Slope Over Intercept

December 2025

At Ramp, we have one core philosophy behind hiring: slope over intercept. You can watch Eric Glyman explain this concept in more detail here on the TBPN show. The TLDW is that you should hire for potential over ability. Many of Ramp’s founding engineering team were new grads. Calvin joined Ramp after graduating early from MIT and wrote the code that makes filing expenses as easy as taking a photo of a receipt. He’s now Chief of Staff. Similarly, Samay started working full time at Ramp as a student and became tech lead of the core spend management product.

I interned at Ramp in the summer of 2024. That fall, I had a big decision to make: return or start somewhere new? I loved my internship at Ramp. It was rewarding, exciting, and stretched me as an engineer. I shipped multiple product features on Bill Pay that impacted real users. I built pre-matching transactions to bills and improved the bill-transaction match algorithm to support automatic transaction-to-bill matching. I also formed meaningful connections with coworkers who became mentors, collaborators, and friends.

Yet, there were still some nagging doubts about whether I should return. Ramp, while well known in startup circles, didn’t have the household name prestige of Google or OpenAI. And although Ramp’s new grad compensation was strong, it wasn’t top of market at the time.¹ I initially left the internship wanting to explore what other opportunities were out there. Within a week, I decided to sign my return offer and cancel all my interviews. What changed? I started optimizing for slope over intercept.

In the same way that Ramp hires for slope, you should evaluate the company you join based on its slope. When a company grows fast, the bottleneck becomes people. There are more problems than there are people to solve them. As a result, the work you do is impactful. Otherwise, why do it when there’s so much else to do? Ramp is one of those companies. In just a year, the number of engineers roughly doubled and Ramp’s valuation increased by more than 4x. That kind of momentum pulls you along with it.

Since joining Ramp full time, I was promoted to L4 in my first review cycle. I’ve shipped over a thousand commits to the core backend repo, making me the 12th highest code contributor since joining. I built a system that has automatically batched millions of bills and billions in Total Payment Volume (TPV). I have a good chance of getting promoted to senior next year.

From the outside, it looks like my success is the result of my own hard work and abilities. That’s true to some extent, but the vast majority of my early career growth was carried by Ramp’s own momentum. Ramp is a rocket ship, and I’m along for the ride. I can pull the throttle to go slightly faster, but my career success has largely been a function of Ramp’s own success. I was fortunate enough to join a company that gave me ample scope to make my own impact. The batch payment system I built was actually the first project I worked on as a full time employee.² I don't think I would've gotten that kind of opportunity at a big tech company. Join a steep curve, and you will find your own slope accelerating with it.

[1] Not to mention how absurdly well quant firms pay new grads.

[2] It was literally the first thing I worked on. No starter tickets.