I tweet, therefore I am. Applied AI x Finance @tryramp
New York, USA
Joined May 2011
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There's a sign at Meta's headquarters in Menlo Park. On one side it says Meta. On the other, facing away from the road, it still says Sun Microsystems. When Facebook moved into the former Sun campus, Zuckerberg kept the old logo on the back of the sign as a reminder of what could happen if they stopped innovating.
Last Friday, Salesforce announced that Heroku is entering "sustaining engineering." No new features, and no new contracts. Maintenance mode. We all know what that means.
When I started in tech, Heroku was the platform you used to build new projects. Every startup, every hackathon, every bootcamp ran on Heroku. It was the obvious choice.
What killed Heroku was getting acquired.
More specifically, getting acquired by a parent company whose interests were not aligned with those of its customers. Salesforce bought Heroku in 2010 for $212 million. From the outside, it looked like game over for anyone building in the same space. Who competes with Salesforce's resources?
The truth though, was that Salesforce bought Heroku as a cross-sell tool for their enterprise accounts. Tod Nielsen, Heroku's CEO from 2013 to 2016, said Salesforce "did a great job of expanding Heroku within corporates," but "what they gave up was all the 'cool kid' innovation." The small developer, the person who actually made Heroku what it was, stopped being the priority the day the deal closed.
So the platform froze. Docker, Kubernetes, serverless, edge computing… all the latest advances in cloud. Heroku shipped none of it. Then in 2022, they killed the free tier. Every future engineering lead who would've discovered Heroku on a weekend project went somewhere else instead.
Five years after the acquisition, Vercel was founded. Vercel built Next.js, an open-source React framework, then made the platform the natural place to run it. And they kept their free tier. All of the hobbyists, students, startups… Heroku handed them that entire pipeline.
Vercel grew revenue 82% year-over-year through 2025 and recently raised at a $9.3 billion valuation. Over 40x higher than Heroku’s exit value.
When the incumbent in your space gets acquired by a big enterprise company, you can often predict what comes next. The acquirer optimizes for enterprise revenue, the product freezes, the community drifts. And the acquirer doesn't notice for years because the sales machine allows enterprise contracts to keep growing... for a while.
The unlimited resources come with new priorities, and those priorities will slowly pull them away from the thing that made them good.
Heroku is now the logo on the back of the sign. Vercel is well on its way to IPO.
If your biggest competitor just got acquired, it could end up being the biggest opportunity yet.
iPhone can now prove whether an image is real. Every phone and camera manufacturer should, and probably will, do this.
Soon, the default assumption will be that every image is AI-generated until proven otherwise. And if you don’t have a digital signature like this for a photo, no one will believe you.
APPLE JUST BUILT A WAY TO PROVE AN IPHONE PHOTO IS REAL
apple says the iPhone 18 Pro can now prove what was actually captured by its camera
the process begins before the image can be edited
the camera signs photo data at the pixel level the moment it is captured
Private Cloud Compute turns that signed data into an unalterable reference image
that reference stays beside the normal editable photo in the Photos app
Apple describes it as a digital negative
it is also supporting SynthID to identify images generated or edited with AI
editing is not the problem. losing the original record is
when any image can be generated, proof of what was actually there becomes the valuable part
In today’s episode of This Makes No Sense:
There’s a perfectly legal way for a household to put up to $159,000 a year into accounts that grow tax-free forever. And there’s a bunch of red tape designed to make it just difficult enough that most people don’t do it.
There are two types of IRAs:
Traditional: you put pre-tax money in, it grows, and you pay taxes when you take it out
Roth: you put after-tax money in, it grows, and you take it out tax-free
The government decided people who make too much money shouldn’t get a Roth, so there’s an income limit.
But the rule is essentially fake. You can put after-tax money into a traditional IRA and convert it to a Roth the next day. It’s basically filling out a form and takes a few minutes. It’s called the backdoor Roth.
And if your employer offers a 401(k), it probably has a Roth 401(k) option. It works basically the same as a Roth IRA, but with no income limit. The only real difference is that one you open yourself and the other goes through your employer.
It gets dumber.
Your 401(k) has a $24,500 “contribution limit” this year, but many plans let you keep contributing after-tax money after you hit it. Then you convert it all to a Roth, again by filling out a form. That’s the mega backdoor Roth. There are a few more logistics, but that’s basically it.
So, you’re legally allowed to put away $79,500 a year per person, tax-free forever. If you’re married and you both work, that’s $159,000.
If you’re fortunate enough to max this out every year, here’s how the math works. Do it for 10 years and you’ve put away about $1.6 million. With average market returns, it’s more like $2.2 million*, and it will never be taxed again. Start at 30 and keep going until 65, and it’s about $22 million**.
If you can’t max it out, you can still put away a much higher percentage of your income tax-free than most people realize.
The rules and all the different account types just exist to make it harder to get there. If you have a good financial advisor, this is close to effortless. If you don’t, you either pay an accountant for something that should be simple or never find out it exists.
If we actually want people to build wealth, we should kill all of this complexity and create one simple retirement account with one high limit for everyone. Everyone gets the same opportunity to put money away without jumping through hoops. Lower-income people would benefit too. Most don’t have access to a sophisticated financial advisor, so they never learn these options exist and leave tax-free room on the table.
Not financial advice. Do your own research. Talk to a professional before making decisions like this.
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* $159,000 contributed at the end of each year for 10 years, compounding at a 7% average annualized real return (a common inflation-adjusted estimate for a stock-heavy portfolio).
** Same math over 35 years (ages 30 to 65): $5.6 million contributed, growing to about $22 million in today’s dollars.
Amazon built infrastructure to sell books, then sold the infrastructure. Now it powers half the internet. Amazon isn’t a bookstore anymore. It’s an infrastructure and supply chain company.
Ramp started as a corporate card. Along the way, we built a coding agent to build Ramp. It’s better than any other I’ve tried, and I’ve tried all the ones you’ve heard of. It blows my mind on a weekly basis.
Today, Ramp Inspect is available to other companies. It’s one of the main answers to “how do you move so fast?” Better coding agent → less time to market → more money.
Ramp is the time and money company.
Also, we’re both yellow. Ok, Amazon is yellow-adjacent. But you get the point.
Every product Ramp shipped this year was built with Inspect.
74% of the code we merge now comes from it. Last November it was close to zero.
Now your team can use it, it’s been a joy onboarding new companies to it. inspect.com
At @tryramp, an agent roasts bad UX, then fixes it. Meet Roasty.
Today it fixed a small bug, posted a video in the relevant Slack channel, and got a PR reviewed by another agent and merged.
But no one warned us that it decided to dress up for halloween... which was an interesting surprise
Every password reset on the internet goes to your email.
Millions of people are now handing their inbox to AI agents running in the background, doing things they can't see. Agents built by companies they've never vetted or already distrust. Companies that have repeatedly shown they can't fully control their own agents.
Why is no one talking about this?
You thought Ramp was a financial product company. Turns out tokens are money and routing is financial intelligence.
Today we’re launching Ramp Router.
3 years ago, we built an internal LLM router at @tryramp that powers AI products for 70,000 customers.
Back then it was mostly about saving money.
Now it feels obvious: the best model changes constantly. GPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Qwen, DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM - prices and capabilities move every week.
So we’re opening up access to everyone.
One OpenAI-compatible endpoint. The right model for every request. Lower cost without rewriting your app.
Reserve access to use it.
Adam Baitch retweeted
3 months ago this was an idea and a small team. Since April, we've activated 1,300+ businesses, captured $62.1M in AI spend, and are now managing 100T+ tokens monthly.
Our customers have seen real impact because our incentives are aligned to help them win, with no stake in which provider or model we recommend.
Today we're launching TSM as a standalone offering to help businesses scale with AI confidently, without needing a Ramp card.
The first wave of AI was adoption. We're building the next one.
AI is extremely good at spending your money very quietly.
our own token spend went from a rounding error to more than 10% of payroll in a year. one week in May we burned through $1.5 m. our CFO didn't love telling me that number, and he really didn't love telling the internet.
but every finance leader we talk to is living the same story. the bill keeps going up and teams can't answer basic questions about it. which team is driving it? which models they're using? what changed this month? whether a cheaper model would do the same job?
so finance gets two bad options: keep paying and hope, or cut broadly and slow down the work that's actually compounding.
we built a third one. Ramp now connects to OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Cursor and pulls it all into one place. see it, understand it, control it - down to a single API key. built with 1,000+ companies managing 100T+ tokens a month, and now spending less than they expected too! try it today at ramp.com/ai-cost-monitoring
Adam Baitch retweeted
@tryramp Applied AI is hiring a frontend-leaning engineer for the Financial Intelligence team.
Build the AI artifacts 70K+ businesses rely on: agentic analysis, FP&A, month-end close, charts, tables, spreadsheets, and workflows over messy financial data.
NYC or SF, details below!
Adam Baitch retweeted
Five years from now Ramp will be as known for corporate cards as Netflix is for DVDs or Amazon is for paper books.
Maybe one year from now.
Adam Baitch retweeted
SpaceX, $SPCX, has announced it more than $100 billion in cash as of June 19
What is money? If you ask an AI chatbot that question, it will probably say something like: money is a unit of account, a store of value, and a medium of exchange. While that's technically accurate, it misses the point. Money is a fundamental primitive of society, just as energy is a fundamental primitive of physics. Fundamentally, money is economic energy.
And like any energy, it leaks. Not just to inflation, but to the quiet stuff: redundant subscriptions, vendor contracts drifting above market, finance teams burning their time recording the past instead of directing the future. Physics has a word for that waste. Entropy.
This is the lens that made @tryramp click for me. Ramp is an economic energy company. Every product does one of two things: maximize the energy a business has, or minimize what it loses to entropy. Cards, bill pay, procurement, treasury, stablecoins all aimed at getting more real work out of every dollar.
All of it is powered by better financial intelligence. We’re building agents that show you where money leaks, identifies efficiency gains, and redirect the flow in real time. Intelligence that maximizes the financial energy of a business. This is the next frontier in finance, and we’re just getting started.
Deeper dive into my full framework of money as economic energy, here:
open.substack.com/pub/adamba…
Earlier this year I decided to find the most AI-forward company in finance & tech. That search led me to Ramp. We're building next-level technology that’s actually changing the way businesses function, and today we’re announcing our $750M Series F at a $44B valuation.
We announced one piece of that future yesterday with Stack, the AI operating system for accounting firms, a $150B industry in itself.
And there is a lot more to come. You may know Ramp from our corporate cards and expense management solutions, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg. Inside the company, the future of corporate finance, banking and accounting are already taking shape.
Ramp is one of the fastest-growing companies ever, and growth is accelerating at scale. We have over 70,000 business customers, many millions of users, over $1B in revenue and we're generating operating cash flow. It's one of those companies you watch and wonder: how do they do it?
I've been asked by many friends about how Ramp operates. Well, it’s an unyielding commitment to product velocity, relentless customer focus, an insanely high talent bar, and the willingness to take big bets that disrupt its own offerings. Ramp has reinvented itself multiple times since its founding, and has done so again over the past year. Ramp is truly AI-pilled. I’ve never seen anything like it. AI is infused into everything we do, and we're the company transforming finance with AI.
Oh, and as one of the leading companies in using AI, we’re hiring more humans than ever. If this excites you, let's talk. But be warned, as was explained to me very clearly, we only hire builders!
I joined Ramp to build the future of Finance. And it's working.
ramp.com/careers
Most companies slow down at scale.
Ramp is accelerating.
70,000+ businesses now run on Ramp. AI agents are becoming part of the finance team. And @RampLabs is shipping frontier experiments every week.
Today: $ 44B.
The next chapter of finance will be agentic and we’re building it.
Adam Baitch retweeted
Say hello to the AI operating system that learns your accounting firm's routine work, then autonomously runs it.
Reconciliations, journal entries, transaction coding, the whole close. Your team only touches what needs a human.
This is Stack. Build it once, run it forever.
Adam Baitch retweeted
Underrated excerpt from $FIG earnings
CFO - "We are also investing in first-party models trained on Figma's design corpus to improve performance on design-specific tasks while reducing cost."
This is huge
While the labs are all over the place, Figma has a chance to ship a frontier design-focused model
Deeper analysis here:
open.substack.com/pub/adamba…
Each time Anthropic releases an industry-specific plugin for Claude, the market reacts violently.
My conspiracy theory: this is a very intentional product strategy, but the point is not to replace SaaS companies with these plugins that “Sherlock” other products. I don’t think they expect, or even want, most consumers to seriously adopt Claude for everything.
The point is to scare other companies into competing with Claude and building AI products as fast as possible.
When Anthropic adds these proofs-of-concept to Claude, it demonstrates that Claude could absorb parts of other products. So, every software must rush to embed more AI into their workflows, agents, copilots, automations, etc. Which, conveniently, means spending more money on Anthropic API compute. And that is how Anthropic really makes their money.
Consumer Claude is Anthropic's loss-leader. If it were to replace everything for users, compute costs per user would explode (even more than they currently are), and monthly prices would have to skyrocket to prohibitive levels in order to maintain Anthropic's business. But since Anthropic's API makes money on a usage basis, their revenue from other businesses' usage can scale much more smoothly. It's up to that other business to make their unit economics work.
For other software companies, this may still be good news. It means that even though it may seem like Claude is trying to make them obsolete, they're likely to only go so far, leaving room to build a more tailored, complete product set for customers. So there is still a ton of room to win, especially if you operate in a compliance-heavy space like legal, healthcare, finance, etc. The challenge is still solving for what Claude won't solve, and doing so profitably.
As for Anthropic, the strategy is brilliant. This is how they will absorb not only their own massive war chest of VC funding, but funnel everyone else’s back to themselves as well.