Redpoint

Co-founder and CEO of Ramp Eric Glyman shared his operating playbook for leading one of the fastest-growing startups on his second appearance on the podcast. We also explored the unique ways Ramp leverages AI internally, strategies for startups to build moats in AI, and the concept of self-driving money. We concluded with one of the most profound and thoughtful discussions about hiring, motivations, and success. It was truly enjoyable to sit down with a seasoned portfolio founder—here are some takeaways… → Ramp’s AI Sales Assistant No person has the time to listen to 50,000 sales calls, but a large language model can. Ramp built an internal Slack bot, Toby, in a weekend, allowing SDRs to ask questions like why customers prefer Ramp over competitors or customer opinions on new features. Toby processes this information in seconds, providing summarized insights from hundreds or thousands of transcripts and helping sales reps do their jobs better. → Interviewing for Curiosity Eric prioritizes hiring for curiosity. To analyze this, ask candidates about a particularly successful project, then ask what they might do differently now. The level of detail in their response will reveal their involvement in the project and their ability to reflect on past experiences, indicating whether they constantly seek improvement. The great ones will be able to go through every level of detail with a high level of specificity. Additionally, ask about their favorite books or recent deep dives outside of work to uncover further curiosity. → The Power of Simple Marketing You have about 5 seconds to deliver a message that is simple, direct, and compelling enough to make prospects want to learn more. Startups often face the challenge of overcoming indifference and getting people to care about their products, as potential customers disregard new products unless they capture attention quickly. So, you must deeply understand what drives customers to spend their time and money to create effective messages. → Don’t Overlook Employees’ Long-Term Goals Organizations often overlook understanding their employees' motivations and long-term goals. However, everyone is the hero of their own story, so it's crucial to periodically check in with employees to see if they are progressing toward their professional aspirations. Hold employees accountable for their main tasks but also ensure they work on problems that can help them progress toward their career goals for higher team motivation. Check out the full episode here: https://lnkd.in/d-3JwzJD

Had a blast diving into Amir Dan Rubin's extensive healthcare career on Vital Signs. Amir previously served as the CEO of One Medical and Stanford Health Care, was an EVP at United/Optum and is now the Founding Managing Partner at Healthier Capital. Our conversation spanned payer-provider integrations, lessons learned from leading One Medical, applications of generative AI, and more. Some highlights: ⚡Combining care models We talked a lot about the One Medical/Iora combination. Amir argues that just because two care delivery approaches may occupy the same physical location (e.g., a clinic), that doesn’t mean they necessarily need to conform to the same economic model. For instance, One Medical and Iora were able to combine effectively despite the former being a membership model and the latter being global capitation. Amir emphasizes that much of the overhead resources (e.g., front desk staff, phlebotomy) can be shared across models. ⚡How One Medical uses generative AI to improve efficiency One Medical allows members to message the care team, and then uses NLP to read the message, figure out its content, and triage it to the appropriate team member. Amir is excited about leveraging internal knowledge graphs to get around hallucinations. This approach can point to relevant internal data in helping compose responses, creating more trust and accuracy in the outputs. ⚡Behind the Amazon acquisition One Medical was interested in expanding its direct to consumer offering. However, they recognized that customer acquisition was costly, which is why partnering with Amazon Prime’s existing membership base made sense for them. Amir explains how at their core, both Amazon and One Medical are all about using technology and logistics to create an excellent customer experience. An awesome conversation ranging from health system innovation to startup strategy to health tech investing! Listen to our full episode below: Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3Wrbnol Apple: https://apple.co/3XWOomb

Thank you, InfraRed Summit 2024! Here are some highlights from an incredible day. Shout out to… • The many founders and tech leaders who made the event unforgettable • Matthew Prince (Co-Founder & CEO, Cloudflare) and Thomas Kurian(CEO, Google Cloud) for insightful fireside chats • Matt Schulman (CEO, Pave) and Atli Thorkelsson for discussing the Redpoint Radar Talent Report • Sai Senthilkumar and Patrick Chase for presenting the InfraRed Report on the state of cloud infrastructure • Finally… a huge thank you to Nasdaq and all of our sponsors: J.P. Morgan Morgan, Alliant Insurance Services, & Cooley LLP. 

InfraRed Summit 2024 was a day to remember! Engaging fireside chats, enlightening presentations, and valuable CXO matchmaking made it truly special. Excited to do it all again next year!

According to Ramp’s Quarterly Spend report, Fireflies.ai was the 4th most popular AI platform by customer count (behind only OpenAI, Midjourney and Anthropic). With over 300,000 customers worldwide and 16M users, Fireflies.ai is operating at a scale few AI companies have reached. This week on Unsupervised Learning we had Krish Ramineni, Co-founder & CEO of Fireflies on to talk about how he sees AI changing the way we work and conduct meetings, and share his biggest learnings around AI in building Fireflies. Some of my favorite takeaways: Why Fireflies doesn’t believe in Fine Tuning Krish explains how the world of AI is changing weekly. This speed makes fine tuning less useful as time goes on. He points out that what worked during the era of GPT3 isn't cutting it anymore with GPT4 and the same will be true in the future. Instead, Krish believes in leveraging prompt engineering and using real-time context to boost AI performance. 💻Building defensibility against incumbents (Teams, Zoom, Meet) Krish talks about taking on the big players in the market, emphasizing the need to focus on solving specific problems deeply within customer workflows. While giants like Teams and Zoom might offer basic services like transcription or general note-taking, Krish argues the real game-changer is providing solutions that deeply integrate and impact significant business decisions—like helping close major deals or managing complex ERP systems. He notes that for large incumbents, features like AI are often just checklist items to boost stock prices, but startups have the agility to innovate without the drag of corporate bureaucracy. By staying lean, focusing deeply on customer needs, and avoiding spreading themselves too thin, startups can outmaneuver larger companies. 🤖The future of work, as Krish sees it Imagine having AI like Fireflies handle the pre-meeting preparations—knowing who you're meeting with, the discussion topics, and what you talked about last time. Post-meeting, instead of the usual rush to update CRMs, create tasks, or document discussions, your AI assistant is already turning your spoken words into actions. Looking further ahead, Krish speculates about AI agents representing us in interactions, perhaps even negotiating or making preliminary decisions on our behalf. While the idea might sound like something out of Black Mirror, it highlights a future where AI handles the mundane, allowing humans to focus on decision-making, creative tasks, and in-depth discussions. Listen to the full episode 👇 YouTube: https://lnkd.in/g5gDrNWP Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4btzir8 Apple: https://apple.co/3XJD7Fy

We were honored to host this rare fireside chat with Satish Dharmaraj, Managing Director at Redpoint at Atomic’s Builders Summit. 🔥 Satish is a serial entrepreneur, 7x Forbes Midas Lister and mentor to the next generation of founders. In short, he’s a 🐐 (and insanely humble.) Tune in to hear his behind the scenes stories of what it was like to be an early investor in Snowflake and Mistral, plus his advice on company building. Invaluable wisdom from one of the industry's best. 🌟  cc Jack Abraham Chester Ng Alex Bard  #Building #Innovation #Entrepreneurship #Startups  https://lnkd.in/gYwD2E9Q

Congratulations to Coder on raising an additional $35M to bring its total series B funding to $65M. We’re proud to continue our partnership with Coder on their mission to simplify and transform how developers deliver their code. More about the fundraise: https://lnkd.in/dvHpbEbU

Big news from Coder today❗We’re thrilled to announce we’ve raised $35M in Series B2 Funding from new investor Georgian, with participation from our existing investors Uncork Capital, Notable Capital, and Redpoint Ventures! This marks a huge milestone for Coder as we double down on cloud development environment’s (CDEs), equipping them with the performance, scale, and security of the cloud while broadening our open-source footprint, and expanding globally. We’re excited to continue on our journey of getting developers in ‘the flow,’ bringing true innovation to their workplace. Read all about the investment and how we plan to reshape the world of CDEs: http://cdr.co/yMjQwNA

Excited to share our story regarding “How We Built a Startup [Langtrace] Within a Startup, By Accident” and highlight why LLM Application Observability and Evaluations are paramount for any product builder using LLMs.  Link: https://lnkd.in/euBtkncg

Yesterday, we at Redpoint hosted our 2nd annual InfraRed Summit. We unveiled the InfraRed 100 list, highlighting the top 100 emerging private companies within cloud infra. In addition to some great fireside chats with Matthew Prince (CEO of Cloudflare) and Thomas Kurian (CEO of Google Cloud), Patrick Chase and I presented our InfraRed Report, showcasing the latest innovations in cloud infra across the private and public markets. Key topics included: • An overview of the current state of the public cloud infrastructure market • The latest trends in AI, data, DevOps, and security • A deep dive into the public index we launched last year ($NQRPCI), and some learnings for private infrastructure businesses Full report here, hope you enjoy!