The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Fri, 28 Feb 2025
George Bonaci is the VP of Growth at Ramp, where he’s helping one of the fastest-growing fintech companies scale even further. Prior to Ramp, George was VP of Growth at Gong. Before Gong, George was at Samsara where he helped grow revenue from $650M ARR, and played a pivotal role in the company’s successful IPO. In Today’s Growth Masterclass We Discuss: 03:57 How the Best Growth Teams Experiment 05:10 How to Allocate Bets and Resources for Growth 07:09 Velocity vs. Quality in Growth 15:05 The Role of Postmortems and How to Do Them 19:16 Growth Team Structure and Standalone or Not? 20:01 The Three Ways to Find Alpha in Growth 30:01 How to Hire for the Best Growth Hires 31:30 How to do Take-Home Assignments When Hiring for Growth 32:51 Common Pitfalls in Hiring Growth Talent 34:16 Investing in Management and Learning 42:43 How AI Changes Growth Products and Strategies 46:43 Quick Fire Round: Common Mistakes and Growth Channels
Chapter 1: Who is George Bonaci and what is Ramp?
This is 20 Growth with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, 20 Growth is the monthly show where we sit down with the best growth leaders in the world to discuss how they scaled their incredible businesses. Today, we have George Bonacci, VP of Growth at Ramp, where he's helping one of the fastest growing fintech companies scale even faster. Prior to Ramp,
George was VP of Growth at Gong, and before Gong, George was at Samsara, where he helped grow revenue from 100 million to 650 million ARR and played a pivotal role in the company's successful IPO. But before we dive into the show today, SecureFrame empowers businesses to build trust with customers by simplifying information security and compliance through AI and automation.
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And speaking of speed, let's talk about something every founder, product leader, and CEO is thinking about, innovation. We all know that innovation is the lifeblood of any company, yet more than 80% of innovation projects stall before they even make it to execution. Why is that?
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Now, at 20VC, we've worked with countless startup founders who know that speed is everything, and that's where AI-powered tools like Miro's come in. From AI sidekicks that act as a designer, analyst, or engineer on demand, to instant AI summaries that condense meeting notes, product briefs, and retrospectives in seconds, Miro is built for teams that want to move fast.
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Try it today at Miro.com. That's M-I-R-O dot com. You have now arrived at your destination. George, I'm so excited for this, dude. Ramp is one of my favorite companies to feature. I've heard so many great things about you. So thank you so much for joining me today. No, thank you so much for having me.
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Chapter 2: How do growth teams experiment effectively?
The goal of growth is to figure out how to grow the business. And usually early on, that's very top of funnel focused. How do you figure out how to get more leads? How do you figure out a channel that works and is repeatable and has predictable outputs given some inputs? And the honest answer is no one really knows. Every business is different.
So even if you understand from past experience something that's worked... Usually just taking that one playbook or that one tactic and copy and pasting it to a new company generally doesn't work. And I think that's the tendency of a lot of marketers.
So when I say that growth is mostly just science, I mean that you kind of have to come in with a blank slate, form a hypothesis, and then run a bunch of experiments. And you'll be surprised about what works. You'll be surprised at what doesn't work. But ultimately, if you run enough of those experiments, you'll find something.
That's usually lost on a lot of marketers because they don't think in terms of experiments. They think in terms of like, what do I know and how can I apply it here? Is that because of the profile of person that they are that they don't think in that way? It's probably partly the profile, but it's also partly just like how you think.
Like I think the type of person that would go and become a chemist like me or an engineer is probably very different than someone that's like, hey, I want to become a writer or a
I want to get into comms or PR, like very valuable skills, but very, very different from the way in thinking or way of thinking that would make someone successful, like scoping an experiment and thinking about like what my hypothesis is and how I'm going to measure results. It's just like a different part of your brain. Like I would be a terrible writer, for example.
You said about running experiments there and running a number of them. Can I ask, in your mind, is growth about increasing performance by one or two percent in many different areas? Or is it about needle moving chapters of a company and being much more pivotal in that respect?
That is a good question. The short answer is it has to be both. If you're doing a good job, and it depends on the stage of the company, but in general, if you're doing a good job, you're thinking in terms of different time horizons. So you have to have some like bucket of bets or experiments that are going to be those like big swing, huge step changes and impact.
But those are generally high risk, high rewards. You can't just do that. Otherwise, you're going to fail and miss your number this quarter. At the same time, you need to have some bets where you have high confidence, but probably not going to move the needle a ton. But it'll help you get the 2%, 3%, 4%, 5% improvement this quarter. And then you have everything in between.
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Chapter 3: What is the balance between velocity and quality in growth?
But in general, I'd probably be biased to run more things faster than run something perfectly.
Does velocity impact quality of conversion? And what I mean by that is if we're a little bit sloppy, but we're very high velocity, we won't spend so much time on the visuals for that campaign, the graphics for this. It's velocity, but it's not as good. How do you think about that trade-off?
Yeah, I think if you had to choose, velocity is more important. But there's the other side of that coin, which is if you're just doing a bunch of sloppy things, it doesn't matter how many things you run, you're not going to actually learn anything. What did you do that was sloppy that you wish wasn't sloppy? Um, it's a good question.
So I'm reminded of this one time, I won't say which company, but we had a webpage and the webpage is conversion. It was trending down and it was trending down for a long time. It was our number one channel. And it was like, Hey, what are we, what are we going to do to solve this? And there were kind of two paths.
There was one where we could run a bunch of individual, well-controlled experiments and understand, hey, changing this button or changing this H1 is like what's going to improve the page and it worked or it didn't. Or we could just run everything at once, kind of use our gut, kind of use our past experience and like hope that it worked.
And we ended up going that latter route, which was definitely the sloppier route, the less rigorous experiment. It did end up working. It did end up working. Uh, so we did end up like three X-ing the webpage conversion rate, like over the course of a couple of weeks and helped us hit our number that quarter. I say that that was like a mistake because we never actually knew what did or didn't work.
And we had to go back and undo a lot of the changes that we made once we did end up AB testing them. But I think that goes back to like the portfolio of bets. Like we were operating on a very short time horizon. So we had to like optimize for velocity versus like rigor.
And then once we were no longer under the gun, we went back and optimized for rigor to understand what worked and what actually didn't.
how do you think about giving something enough time to know if it works we want a high velocity and we need to move on but also sometimes it takes a little bit of time content in particular i would say 12 to 18 months yeah how do you think about enough time but not being slow it goes back to the portfolio like if you're going to allocate 20 30 of your time to like longer term bets that's fine be okay with the fact that you're not going to get results anytime soon
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Chapter 4: How should startups approach hiring for growth roles?
Totally agree with you. Can I just on the bets that we continue to go back to? How much is too much concentration? When you think about a portfolio, it's like, hey, traditionally in venture, you don't want to be definitely not more than 10% in one single investment. How do you think about too much concentration in a growth portfolio?
Yeah, I think if you're doing things right, the concentration will change. It's almost like when you find something that works, if you do a really good job of saturating it as quickly as possible, you will be by almost definition, like really concentrated there, at least for a period of time.
It's really how quickly you can diversify and stack different bets and different wins so that you're not concentrated for too long of a period of time. But I think concentration in and of itself is not a bad thing. It means that you're doing a good job maximizing an area.
How do you think about communicating growth goals to other elements of the organization? You're sitting there in your independent growth team, say, and you also have to work with product and you also have to work with marketing. How do you work together most efficiently to communicate this is what I'm going after?
I think communicating the way growth thinks about things is probably like more important than like what specifically they're doing. As long as everyone's aligned that like the growth team's job is actually aligned with everyone else's in the company, which is like we need to be successful. Like growth team's job is not to make anyone happy. It's to make the business successful.
And that might mean like for a period of time working really closely with product or really working really close with product marketing or some other element of the business.
But really, they should recognize and growth should be able to communicate that we're bringing a unique skill set and unique point of view that hopefully is complementary to their skill set and their point of view, but ultimately the same goal of making the business successful.
You're an angel in my company, George, and we're sitting down for a coffee and we're going for some advice. And I'm at about a million in revenue. I've just raised a Series A. Is now the time to bring in a head of growth? And how do you advise me on when is the right time to bring in someone for growth? And what type of person? Is it senior or junior?
Yeah, I would always skew more junior. I think hiring for potential, especially early on in the business, is far, far more important.
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Chapter 5: What is Alpha in growth and how can it be found?
Or maybe it helps uncreative people more is maybe what I'd say. The number of times that I've had chat GPT just be like, how do I make this better? How do I add a joke in here? What are some other like visuals I can do? What's a good analogy for XYZ? I wouldn't have been able to do that on my own. I would have had to go to someone on product marketing or content and be like, hey, I need some help.
Can I ask you, how do you advise founders competing in incredibly intense competitive markets? Ramp is in a very competitive market across a number of different products. What's your biggest advice on competing in very proliferated markets?
Yeah. I think it's like most things, you just have to have a better product and you have to have some plan for distribution. I think that having a better product probably solves like 80, 90% of the battle. But you also need to think about how you're going to distribute that product and like what your unfair advantages in distribution.
And hopefully that's where the growth team comes in and where they can provide value. But I do think it's mostly on the product.
Do you agree with the suggestion, build it and they will come? Yeah.
Absolutely not. No. I'm a marketer at the end of the day and I'm a growth person. That is antithetical to everything we stand for. There are some products, sure, where like, yes, it is so amazing and the word of mouth was so strong that they did build it and people did come. I think that is so out of the ordinary and leaves your fate so much to chance that that's not a good approach.
Listen, George, I've loved this. You are unbelievably concise with answers. I call it kind of word economy, which is like value per word. And like most people are fluffy and don't say much, but it takes a long time. You're unbelievably concise with very dense value. It makes my life a joy, to be quite honest. I want to do a quick fire with you. So I say a short statement.
You give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound OK? Sure, let's do it. OK, so number one. What's the most common, expensive, deadly, irreversible mistake you see founders make?
Hiring for experience because they don't know any better. Like, we don't know how to do this. We'll hire someone that does. And it should be we should hire someone who doesn't? It should be like, we should actually assess for, hey, how do we determine what good looks like? And how do we test them for it? And like, could someone figure this out?
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