Velocity requires radical empowerment and trust

Velocity is everything at Ramp. It's how we design our product development process. It's how we incentivize teams, it's who we want to hire, it's who we want to promote, and it's everything around how we make decisions and how we organize the organization.

You can't ask for velocity and not have empowerment and not trust and not eliminate process and not increase the focus. And that requires some serious tradeoffs that oftentimes leaders, especially those coming from more traditional industries, are not comfortable with.

Let's not schedule a meeting for next week or tomorrow or later today. We're in the middle of a meeting, we need to make a decision. Let's either make the decision or if we can't, let's Slack call in the person that we need in order to make that decision. And we'll be done with the decision today.

We always have this mentality we are a startup, we're a young company, we're always hungry for growth. And a very wacky way is like, 'How can I run my second half of my marathon faster than the first half?'