These stunts are out in full force for tonight in MLB DFS. We got Jacob DeGrom, Brandon Woodruff, Max Scherzer, Clayton Kershaw, Lucas Geolito. The list goes on and on. Really good pitchers available for tonight in MLB DFS. All we got to do is decide which guys want to prioritize, which value plays a hitter we can turn to to jam them in and get you set for a fun Friday of MLB DFS. Welcome on into the FanDuel Fantasy Q&A. My name is Jim Sonnis. I am a senior writer and analyst for NumberFire.com. Here to answer your questions for the next 25 minutes and get you set for tonight's MLB DFS. Slate Lock is at 7.05. It is a 13-game slate with a lot of good options across the board. As always, we are taking your questions live on air no matter where you're watching. You're watching YouTube, Twitch, Facebook or Twitter. Get those questions in for today's slate. We can talk pitchers, stacks, one-offs, MLB DFS process, whatever is on your mind. Get those questions in right now, YouTube chat, Twitch chat, Facebook comments, wherever you're watching. We'll take your questions live on air here for today. But also make sure you are subscribed on your platform of choice because we are doing this each and every weekday at 4 p.m. and at 3.30 as well on Tuesdays. For the PGA Q&A we have the U.S. Open next week, so a big one there. So make sure you are subscribed on your platform of choice and if you're watching on YouTube, hit the like button because that does help us out quite a bit. Let's take a look at the pitching options. For today we've got to Grom. We've got Woodruff, Scherzer, Geolito, Kershaw. And our task is to rank those guys. To me, if we can use Max Scherzer, I want to rank him number one facing the Giants. Good offense, but they will strike out a 27% strikeout rate versus righties. Second highest mark on this slate. Scherzer is at 36%. And also a reduced salary of $11,000. So to me, if we get Scherzer available to us, I'm going to take it. Problem is, I'm not sure we will. There is rain in the forecast here. It looks like it may be letting up at some point. I want to check what Kevin Roth of Rodegrinder says around 5.30 or so when he does his updated weather look for today. If he says we're good to go, Scherzer will be my number one option for today at Pitcher. Number two would be Jacob DeGrom. He is $12,000 for today facing the Padres. Tough matchup, but I do think that he's still worth it because he's Jacob DeGrom. So to me, I'm going to be in on DeGrom number two. I would go Kershaw three facing the Rangers. Good matchup at home. He's very similar to me to Woodruff, but Kershaw is $2,000 less. So I'll take Kershaw there. Woodruff then Geolito. Actually, we'll go Geolito Woodruff. Geolito facing a high strikeout team. Duplicate matchup, which is why I'm not super sold putting him above Woodruff, but I still think that he is the number three for me or number four for me for today. Let's start things off here. Taking questions from Facebook. Starting off with Joseph. Joseph is saying, all I got to say, how about Zach Wheeler? Zach Wheeler was awesome yesterday. He was the first to hit him on the early only slate facing the Braves tough matchup. But hey, you know, it's Zach Wheeler. He's great. I'm looking forward to having Zach Wheeler back in the main slate in the very near future. Let's start things off over on YouTube now by talking to Michael. Michael is asking, how would you upgrade or downgrade a Houston stack versus Ober versus Shoemaker? So what he's referencing there is that initially Matt Shoemaker is going to start this game for today for the twins. It's now Bailey Ober. I think it's a downgrade for Houston. I think better picture than Shoemaker. Shoemaker, super low strikeout rate this year Ober. What I have here, I believe is the bat projections. They project him for a 23% strikeout rate and a 5% walk rate. Those are good numbers. The problem is, and the reason I'd still be willing to stack Houston is that I think he's probably going to have some batted ball issues. So you could still stack Houston. The problem I run into is that Houston is super high salary. They're hitters here. You'll see that among the guys I actively want to use, Kyle Tucker is the only one with a salary below $3600. So that's tough to get to. When you go into Grom, Scherzer, even Kershaw, it's kind of tough. So I am okay deprioritizing the asterisks from where I was at earlier this morning. I think that it is a downgrade for them with Ober versus Shoemaker. They still don't play. If you got salary to get to them, they do work. Again, I think that Ober may struggle with balls and play, but it is a downgrade from what we had earlier today. Good question from you there, Michael. Let's talk to W. W. Fresh. What is the chalk for today? To find this, we can go over to the number of fire heathen because in general, you're going to see a heavy overlap between popularity and implied totals. So to Grom, obviously a pitcher will be the chalk. This to me says Scherzer might go a bit overlooked relative to where he should be. And also it does help that the rain may scare some people off. So that really helps me the Scherzer to Grom be the chalk because he's to Grom. So I bet the Kershaw carries a lot of popularity as well. Moving over to hitters, Astros still have a high implied total that is down from what it was. I believe it was like 6.2 at one point today, but that's come down with Ober starting. It hasn't changed there, but it has changed with Ober starting in place of Shoemaker. Cincinnati against Freeland. I think it's a solid stack, not my favorite stack, but definitely one I like. Then Cleveland against Dunn. I would expect all those teams to be pretty popular. So if we're looking at teams, I like more the Consensus, the Dodgers, definitely check that. Facing Mike Foltenevich and the Milwaukee Brewers against Chase DeYoung. Two teams I think I'm going to like more than others do. So to me, I would say those are the teams I am turning to for today if we're trying to deviate from what the public will be doing. Let's go back to Facebook and talk to Nick. Nick is asking thoughts on Ross stripling against Boston. I am going to hold off and not use it as a picture, but also not stack against him. I'm assuming you were asking about this from a stacking perspective. Stripling, this is over his five outings with more forcing fastballs. He has a 26% in strikeout rate, 3.46 skill interactive ERA, low walk rate. He's been pretty good. He had a big game, I think, against Atlanta a couple weeks ago that really jacked up his strikeout rate.  They're a very powerful team. So you could consider Boston. I would not use stripling though because they are so good because there's some shakiness in this profile and because we have other options we can turn to at picture for today. So no stripling for me and the Red Sox an okay stack, but not one I'm actively seeking out. Let's talk to Kyle over on YouTube. Favorite one off utility play at $2,700 or lower. Thanks. Let's go over here to utility and check things out. For me, my one offs tend to be just like teams I'm not stacking in that specific lineup. Like if I have, let's say I'm stacking the Astros in general, but I'm not stacking the Astros in that lineup, I will stack my one off will probably be from that team in order to get additional exposure and limit the number of pitchers I am targeting. Let's look at here some one offs at utility. I'm in Rosario as a guy, I scroll past but I think that he is an option given Cleveland in a good spot. He is someone who has been playing pretty well recently. Josh Bell would also work, talked about D's Clifani and why it'd be okay targeting him yesterday. That does still apply. It's not like super high on my list. I think that Schwerber is 25 or so probably. Prefer Schwerber over Josh Bell, but he would at least be on the list there as well. Scrolling down here for some other options potentially, yeah, I think that Schwerber works. So Schwerber, Bell, and then we're looking at the Dodgers if you're spending down. Will Smith should not be $2,600. That is way too low for a guy as good as he is. I think that is a tremendous number. Honestly, among the guys we've looked at so far, I'm probably going to rank Will Smith the highest. So let's say Will Smith as being the number one for today. I do like Tyler Stevenson and Bobby Bradley. Bradley hitting fifth for today. Really good power numbers in the minors. Good matchup for today as well. So I do like Bradley a pretty decent amount. Let's talk to Aaron. Just run Houston four through seven and don't look twice. Again, it's going to be tough to get there from a salary perspective and they do get downgraded to me with the change to Ober versus Shoemaker. I also said Gouriel or Walsh, only a $300 difference in style. I'm assuming this is Jared Walsh. I would probably wind up going Walsh. I mean, I'm okay with Gouriel, but I just like Walsh the hitter more. Based on Meryl Kelly. I have not stacked against Kelly recently. The ground ball or the fly ball rate has come down from recently. So good on him made some recent changes that have been better for him, but Jared Walsh I just think is a really talented baseball player and I value his numbers here versus righties. So I can show you what I'm talking about here. He has a 278 ISO, a good hard hit rate, not a lot of strikeouts. So to me, if I can get to Jared Walsh, also really good part for today in Arizona. So to me, Jared Walsh very much worth the $300 in salary it takes to get there versus Yuli Gouriel. Let's talk to Diffuse over on YouTube between the Rosarios, Eddie and Ahmed and Cesar Hernandez. Who do you look to complete a full Cleveland stack of Jose Ramirez, Bobby Bradley and Josh Naylor. I do like Ramirez, Bradley and Naylor. So I like that start there for you Diffuse. Let's pull up the Cleveland numbers and versus righties this year. I'm pretty sure I'm going to settle on Ahmed Rosario, but let's double check this to make sure I'm not spewing some nonsense. Let's sort here by played appearances versus righties. Okay, Cesar Hernandez 110 ISO, no stolen bases, gross. Eddie Rosario 118 ISO, five stolen bases. Okay, that helps a lot of fly balls. That's nice. And then Ahmed Rosario 113 ISO, five steals. So it's between the Rosarios for sure. I would probably lean. I guess I'd lean towards Eddie. I guess I didn't realize how active Eddie Rosario has been on the bases so far this year. So I'll go Eddie over Ahmed, but it's pretty close. I would say if you have a strong inclination towards one over the other if one fits better positionally, then I would be okay going with them, but they are pretty close. So probably, probably Eddie for me just for the fly ball right that he does provide. Let's talk to Rob on Facebook. What about a blue J-Stack versus Richards? He looked horrible last game versus the Yankees. I think that they're kind of similar to what we talked about the Red Sox where you can definitely do it. There are a couple things that push me a bit lower. The first one is a temperature in Boston for today, just 65 degrees. That is pretty low relative to the rest of the slate. So that's a downgrade for hitters in this game. But also Richards is a ground ball pitcher. He has allowed a 30% fly ball right so far this year. That's a low number. If our choosing between stacking against Richards or stacking against Tripling, so stacking the J's versus stacking the Red Sox, I'd rather stack the J's. I feel better using hitters facing Richards than I do hitters facing Tripling, but to me, they're both kind of like secondary plays where I'm like, if I don't get there, that's fine. So the blue J is fine. The reason I'm not super enthused is the temperature and the low fly ball rate allowed, but they're okay. That's what I would say there. Let's talk to DeFuge. The Astros lefties in the likes of Jordan Alvarez and Kyle Pucker get a downgrade as well. So I don't tend to view things in that way. I view it in the sense of I downgrade stack, which downgrades everyone, because the way this works is because with baseball, there's no clock. If I downgrade one player on the team, increase the out potential for that player, it downgrades everyone, because every time Jose Altube gets a hit, that means that there is additional volume available, additional RBI opportunities available for Alex Bregman, Carlos Correa, et cetera. So if I downgrade Jose Altube, I'm inherently downgrading everyone else. So yes, they also do get a downgrade, because I'm downgrading the team as a whole. So you can use Alvarez and Tucker. I do still think that they're very in play, because again, I'd expect Ober to have some issues with the battered balls he allows based on this fly ball rate, based on the very small sample of hard hit rate against him. I could see him struggling with balls in play. So Alvarez and Tucker are very viable. I just would downgrade them to answer your question, because it's not about them. It's about the stack as a whole, and the stack as a whole does get a slight ding down as a result of the way things great out here for the team as a whole. Let's talk to Michael over on Facebook. What about the Milwaukee Brewers pitching staff? Really good. If you were someone who was in on the Brewers from a from a division winning perspective prior to the year, you're very happy to see how they've done. Freddie Peralta, not totally odd yesterday. I'm curious what he would have done up into the rain delay, but when you got Woodruff and Burns, which sounds like Woodward and Burns, I listen to a podcast on Watergate, so I'm totally like in the Washington Post mold here mode here. When you got those two guys and then Peralta is your three, things are pretty sweet. I actually don't mind the Brewers today from a stacking perspective as well. That's not what you asked Michael, but I do like them quite a bit from a stacking perspective for today. They are facing off with Chase DeYoung. Chase DeYoung, I should say, and DeYoung probably going to be a guy with some issues with that at Balls. He does get some strikeouts. This is across four starts in the big leagues since it started last year, a 25% strikeout rate, but a lot of flyballs. The Brewers playing better as of late. They've got some value there to help make it easier to get to Scherzer, Kershaw, DeGrom and all those guys. I like the Brewers offense today, but the Brewers pitching staff always very good. Let's talk to Jerry over on Facebook rate these stacks, Houston, Tampa Bay, Boston, Cincinnati, and how do you feel about Yarbrough? I will not get to Yarbrough for today, doesn't get enough strikeouts. Really annoying and the Orioles also a low strikeout team versus lefties. So to me, no interest in Yarbrough personally. As far as the stacks, Houston, Tampa Bay, Boston and Sinsi, I would say probably still Houston won there if you can get to them. You can get to the salaries. They're still going to be a solid stack. They're just not as good and not as good relative to their salary as they were before. So Houston's still number one of those Jerry and they're solid. I would say Cincinnati's number two facing Kyle Freeland, who is going to be someone who lets up a lot of balls and play. Across three starts this year, 11% strikeout rate compared to a 13% walk rate. He does get ground balls, but I overall do think this is a good job for them since Cincinnati number two, but also a really solid number two option. So I'm very okay going with the reds. Boston is facing stripling medium levels of interest there. So at Tampa Bay, the one I missed is facing Keegan Aiken. I think Aiken's decent does let up some rough ball and play numbers. But with the amount the raised strikeout versus the lefties I think you've got better options. So to me if I'm ranking those Jerry, I would go Houston one, Cincinnati two, Boston three, and then Tampa Bay number four. Michael, the Brewer's lineup is out. Okay, so Luis Orias is batting leadoff. Love that. Dan Vogelbach second, Christian Yelich, Avicio Garcia, Omar Narváez. Okay, this is what I was hoping for for today. I think it's a really good lineup for us from a stacking perspective. So let's pretend here for a second we cannot use DeGrom or we cannot use Scherzer and we're forced to use DeGrom instead. I think that this lineup with the way it's constructed should actually make that pretty easy. I won't have the Brewer's lineup filled in here yet because I refreshed too long ago, but we can use Michael to look at the way things shake out here. I'm going to like Orias because he's a really solid player batting leadoff. I've been high on him for a while now and I'm glad that he's finally getting a chance to shine. And again, Dynasty shares very happy about all this. So we'll put him there. Probably going to want Jace Peterson. He had good power numbers in a small sample in AAA. Let's see which flexibility I get if I go Peterson as an outfielder here. That works pretty well. Probably going to want Narváez and Vogelbach. If I do that 33-25 left for my second stack alongside with DeGrom and none of those batters are guys I would be uncomfortable using. I think you can defend using all those players. So personally, I am okay with this as a stack. If you don't want to go Peterson totally understands you could upgrade to Abyssal Garcia instead. And if we do that, we are at 3100 left. That's also doable, especially given the low salaries that the Dodgers provide us most likely, depending what the lineup looks like. You're looking like Pollock or something there, McKinstry, hopefully at second base. That works out pretty well. So passing up Yelich, which is always kind of scary, but I'm still okay with it personally. Looking pretty good with the Brewer's stack for today. Mateo, do you think the Reds game plays tonight? I do. I was looking at Kevin Roth's initial forecast this morning. He didn't seem super concerned about it. The one game that was decently concerning was the Nationals versus the Giants. If you're planning on playing Scherzer or stacking the Nationals make sure you are around the clock hours. In the 6 o'clock p.m. Eastern hour to check back on the weather there, see how things are looking and see if we can get that game in for today. I think that's the one that's kind of in danger. The Reds one does have some weather like it does have some rain, but I bet that they are good to go for today. So if you want to stack the Reds, which I'm very okay with, I think you should be fine to do so. Also, Tyler Malley is a potential value play not super enthused and I don't need to get there. But among the guys who are probably getting a $9,000, he probably is my number one guy for tonight. Let's go back to Jerry and talk about home run props for tonight. Okay, so Jerry is asking what are your favorite hitters for home runs? I'm giving a Vado home run call. What do you think? Okay, so Joey Vado is facing Freeland. It's a lefty on lefty, but Joey Vado's fun. So I think if I were going with the Red, I'd probably lean towards Castellanos for the Batoon advantage, but not going to talk because he's really fun. Other home run calls for today. Okay, this is fun. This is my favorite part of the day. I want to make sure I'm getting good weather. I want to make sure I'm getting someone facing a pitcher who lets up a lot of impactful contact with that in mind. I think that JD Martinez could work against Roth Stripling could get behind that. Other options potentially going at Bobby Bradley if you want someone more so off the radar, Cleveland against Justin Dunn.  Probably looking at the Dodgers here I would guess it's going to lead us to Max Munsey. Haven't quite seen enough from Bellinger to like, necessarily say like I have a ton of confidence in him right now.  So if we're looking at the Dodgers probably Munsey and then Will Smith. So if I'm going to narrow things down to just three for you, Jerry, let's go with I'm going to go JD Martinez against Roth Stripling. I'm going to go with Max Munsey against Mike Fultonevich and I'm going to go who was the other one. I guess Bobby Bradley was the fun one. So make Bobby Bradley the fun one. Will Smith could be kind of fun too. Those are the ones I would turn to for today. Aaron, Barron's projected to start today over Will Smith. Yeah, because generally Barron's is the personal catcher for Clayton Kershaw. So I talked to Will Smith earlier. Total brain fart on my part forgot the Kershaw's pitching. So if you're filling out lineups now I would not fill them out I would not fill them out with the thought in mind that Will Smith will play. I'll probably sit today because it is Kershaw. Totally forgot about that. You are right. I had the brain fart there. It likely will be Austin Barnes. Alvin do you like the raise? Not particularly they're facing Aiken again who does let up some impactful contact but issue I have here is that they strike out a ton against lefties it's also a bad park for heading for today because a lot of games are outdoors this one is not as the weather has gotten warmer that means the park factor for Tampa Bay gets downgraded a bit. So I would say I would say that they do wind up being kind of low on my list like Alvin if your process leads you to stacking the raise don't go counter that because there are reasons to like it with Keegan Aiken given the kind of quality of contact he allows but for me personally where I'm trying to get a lot of balls and play not going to get that from the raise against lefty and I think there are better options considering park factor and considering other things for this one trying to think of this as anything else we have not yet discussed as far as stacks and stuff for today we did mention briefly the Dodgers I was on a time with Will Smith before and forgetting that he probably will not play for today but I think other options on that Dodgers team let's assume that Will Smith does not go because you know it is Kershaw out there there should still be some value plays within this lineup for today so let's pull them up I'm probably thinking it'll be AJ Pollock we'll see if McKinstry plays I'm not sure if he will but Pollock should be in there at $2,400 I will take that McKinstry potentially playing Gavin Lux $2,500 ok I like that let's do that here second base might be worse but I guess with Muncie it's not as bad Taylor I don't tend to get to as often just because he's not like a super powerful guy versus righties so Matt Beatty might play I'm not as in him as McKinstry so hopefully McKinstry plays that would definitely help you know if we get him then $3,200 left in a DeGraw lineup that means I could probably get to Betts or Muncie one or the other yeah that's not too bad so I would check out the value options within the Dodgers if we were to rank out the value options in the Dodgers I would say Pollock is one despite the fact he's a rightie actually Lux one, Pollock two McKinstry three Beatty four if Will Smith plays he's number one but again I probably would not would not assume that he is there Alvin any changes to your stack rankings from this morning the big change for me was downgrading the Astros as a result of Bailey Ober starting over Matt Shoemaker I still think they're a good stack I am just less willing to bend over backwards to get them Ober starting as opposed to Shoemaker they're still fine like if you really love Tyler Malley for today and using a lower salary picture then feel free to stack the Astros I still think they're a good option it's just harder for me to prioritize them when their salaries are super high when the pitching salaries are super high so they did get downgraded which naturally pushes up some other teams so the Dodgers stayed the same gonna probably want it moving up the Reds moving up Cleveland a bit those are probably the main ones and the Brewers as being beneficiaries just because the Astros got moved down for me Diffuse, I personally like Kyle Seeger as a one-off at third base what do you think? So Seeger is facing Savalli Savalli I tend to be lower on him than other so that's actually not a terrible situation I would not talk you out of it because Savalli is a good pitcher so I'm not going to get there myself but also he's not like a shutdown guy so I think that's fine I think there are probably better options but it's not a terrible one by any means Aaron Pittsburgh lineup is confirmed they're facing Woodruff okay so I guess we can refresh this and see what Woodruff is facing not sure if they could do a lineup that would like make me scared of Woodruff at all but we'll check it just to be safe yeah that's fine I definitely think that Woodruff grades out just as well finally let's wrap up here with Jerry kind of favor low or low I guess okay so it's low or low because it's talking about Keegan Akin okay so Jerry likes low to hit a home run against Akin lefty on lefty good call or bad call I think Brandon Laos numbers against lefties are not very good we pull that up though to confirm we don't want to care about the results we want to look at the peripherals so look at the fly ball rate look at the strikeout rate see what he's doing versus lefties so far this year Brandon Laos has a 40% strikeout rate the fly ball rate is fine but not a lot of hard contact I would avoid Brandon Laos personally just don't think that the lefty-on-lefty matchup is good enough for me there that is all the time that we have for today here on the Fandil fantasy Q and A good questions all around though appreciate the interaction appreciate all of you tuning in not just today but also for the entire week make sure you are subscribed to the Fandil YouTube, Twitch, Facebook or Twitter page no matter where you watch get those subscriptions in and get those questions in each weekday here at 4pm eastern YouTube, Twitch, Facebook and Twitter and if you're watching on the Fandil YouTube page hit the like button because that does help us out quite a bit if you have additional questions for me I am on Twitter at Jim Sonnis J-I-M-S-A-M-N-E-S big thank you to Calvin Theobald our video producer for running the video side of things here today thank you Cal as always and thank you to everyone for tuning in good luck to you with your MLB DFS lineup for tonight and we'll talk to you once again on Monday this has been the Fandil Fantasy Q and A


Freedom is a game publisher now, in addition to a YouTube network. That means we will get you early access to games on Steam, never before released and you will be able to cover them on your YouTube channel, Twitch livestream, Facebook gaming pages, before everybody else on YouTube, Twitch or Facebook gaming can. Our first game is launching August 14th and you will get emails with custom game codes over 500 will be going out this weekend and early next week. If you want your custom game code, email support at freedom.tm to make sure you get it. The game name I cannot announce just yet, but everyone who successfully guessed it will get a game key and if you want to get one because you're curious just email us. This is the first time we're ever doing this Freedom Family. This is the first time any MCN in the world is doing this, I think, Freedom Family and we will be doing many of these. I'm so excited guys. I can't wait to see the videos you will produce that you will have early access to. I'm going to make videos about the game, you can be sure. Tell me down there in the comments below how you feel about this.  Freedom Games is the brand that we are calling the Game Publishing Division of Freedom which is different from MGM Studios which is our game development division of freedom where we built games like The Clot, Thickens and Wordfall. Freedom Games is not a game developer. It works with game developers that are at the last mile of publishing where they need help with marketing and strategy to make their game launch successful. That's what Freedom Games does for the gaming industry. We bring you the Freedom Network, our connections in Twitch, Facebook Gaming and other platforms to help games have a successful launch. So if you're a game developer and you're interested to learn more also email support.freedom.gg but we will soon have our own dedicated website. Sorry, I just gave you the website. at support.freedom.tm and we will have a dedicated website with a unique set of people and teams specific for game developers to connect with and get a launch plan together. That was coming soon but for now just email our YouTube support support.freedom.tm if you'd like to learn more. Alright, this weekend will be a big weekend guys. Lots of emails going out to 500 of you and more. Just email support.freedom.tm and I will be so excited to launch these my videos of this game on the day August 14th before everybody else. I hope you are too. This is a bit of a special announcement video so I won't be reading your comments but I will do the next episode of The George Show and I'll give you a lot more details. Ask questions, anything you'd like to know down there in the comments below. I'm George, CEO and founder of Freedom for Freedom and Freedom Games the new game publishing division of Freedom. Yeah, that's right. So, hope you stay safe, get some exercise, keep fit and healthy and we'll see you on the next episode. Click the like button if you liked this video. Subscribe to Freedom Central. Gong that notification bell so you don't miss a thing. Oh, and we will have a new YouTube channel, a new Facebook page, Twitter account, Instagram and all those things for Freedom Games. So I'll be encouraging you to subscribe and follow all of those different properties if you are excited about game publishing. Alright, until the next episode. I'm George and you've been watching. Oh, you're dreaming but love. Yeah. Click that I to partner with Freedom and join the Freedom family so we can all grow together. You get many perks like position music. You also get epidemic sound, a lot of other access to royalty-free videos, sponsorships and many things to help you grow. Just click the links down there in the description below to get involved in our community, our forums, our Discord chat servers, meet our graphics team, meet our community team, all of that on Discord and the forums. What are you waiting for? Get started. And we will grow together as a family because this is the Freedom family. You are part of it. We are all part of it and we're all growing together. To get more George, click that big F that will subscribe you to Freedom Central, home of the George show. And PewDiePie gave one of you Freedom family a big shout out. Click that video to see the shout out and to see our new 3D sets for you. And click that video to see what YouTube recommends you watch next.


I'm Dave Nicholson and welcome to Dell Technologies World 2022. I'm delighted to be joined by Tony Bishop. Tony is Senior Vice President, Enterprise Strategy at Digital Realty. Tony, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, Dave. Happy to be here. So Tony, tell me about your role at Digital Realty and give us a little background on Digital Realty and what you do. Absolutely. So my job is to figure out how to make our product and experience relevant for enterprises and partners alike. Digital Realty is probably one of the best kept secrets in the industry. It's the largest provider of multi-tenant data center capacity in the world. Over 300 data centers, 50-some metros, 26 countries, six continents. So it's a substantial provider of data center infrastructure capacity to hyperscale clouds to the largest enterprise in the world and everywhere in between. So what's the connection with Dell? What are you guys doing with Dell? I think it's gonna be a marriage made in heaven in terms of the partnership. You think of Dell as the largest leading provider of critical IT infrastructure for companies around the world. They bring expertise in building the most relevant, performant efficient infrastructure, combine that with the most, the largest most relevant full spectrum capability provider of data center capacity. And together you create this integrated pre-engineered kind of experience where infrastructure can be delivered on demand, secure and compliant, performant and efficient and really unlock the opportunity that's trapped in the world around data. So speaking of data, you have a unique view at digital realty because you're seeing things in aggregate in a way that maybe a single client wouldn't be seeing them. What are some of the trends and important things we need to be aware of as we move forward from a data center, from an IT perspective, frankly? Yeah, yeah, it's an excellent question. I mean, the good part of the vantage point is we see emerging trends. As they start to unfold, because you have the most unique diverse set of customers coming together and coming together, almost organized like in a community effect because you have them connecting and attaching to each other's infrastructure sharing data. And what we've seen is an explosion in data being created, data being processed, aggregated, stored and then being enriched. And it's really around that, what we call the data creation life cycle where what we're seeing is that data then needs to be shared across many different devices, applications, systems, companies, users. And that ends up creating this new type of workflow driven world that's very intelligent and is going to cause a radical explosion in our eyes of needing more infrastructure, more infrastructure faster and more infrastructure as a service. Yeah, when you talk about data and you talk about all of these connectivity points and communication points, talk about how some of those or explained to us, some of these are outside of your facilities and some of them are within your facilities. We, in this virtualized, abstracted world we live in, it's easy to think that everything lives in our endpoint mobile device. But talk about how that gravity associated with data affects things moving forward. Absolutely, you know, I'm glad you brought up about the mobile device because I think it's probably the easiest thing to attach to to think about how the mobile devices has radically liberated and transformed into users and in versions of mobile devices, even being sensors, not just people on a mobile phone in proliferating everywhere. So that proliferation of these endpoints that are accessing and coming over different networks, mobile networks, Wi-Fi networks, corporate networks all end up generating data that then needs to be brought together and processed. And what we found is that we found a study that we've been spending multiple years and multiple millions of dollars building into an index and a tool called the Data Gravity Index where we've been able to quantify not only this data creation lifecycle, but how big and how fast and how it creates a gravitational effect because as more data gets shared with more applications, it becomes very localized. And so we've now measured and predicted for 700 mentors around the world where that data gravity effect is occurring and it's affecting every industry, every enterprise and it's going to fundamentally change how infrastructure needs to be architected because it needs to become data-centric. It used to be connectivity-centric, but with these mobile phones and endpoints going everywhere, you have to create a meeting place and it has to be a meeting place where the data comes together and then systems and services are brought and user traffic comes in and out of. So in other words, despite your prowess in this space, you guys have yet to solve the speed of light issue and the cost of bandwidth issue moving between sides. So it was a fair to say that in an ideal world you could have dozens of actually different customers, separate entities that are physically living in data center locations that are built and posted and run by digital realty, communicating with one another. So when these services are communicating, instead of communicating over 100 miles or 1,000 miles, it's like one side of the chicken wire fence to the other. Not that you use chicken wire in your data center, but I think you get the point, is that fair? It is, it's like the mall analogy, right? You know, you're building these data malls and everybody's bringing their relevant infrastructure and then using private secure connections between each other and then enabling the ability for data to be exchanged, enriched and new business be conductive. So no, physics hasn't been solved, Dave, just to add to that. And what we're finding is it's not just physics. One of the other things that we're continuing to see and hear from customers and that we continue to study as a trend is regulations, compliance and security are becoming as big a factors as physics is. So it's not just physics and costs, which I agree with what you're saying, but there's also these other dimensions that's then affecting placement, connectivity in the management of data and infrastructure. Basically, in all major metros around the world where companies do business and providers support them or customers come to meet them both physically and digitally. It's kind of, it's an interesting trend, right? I think a number of the industry and let's call it a digital twin where there's a virtual version or if a digital version or a physical version and that's probably the best way to think of us is that secure meeting place where each can have their own secure infrastructure of what's being digitized but actually being placed physically. Yeah, that's interesting. There's a lot of, when you look at this from the Dell Digital Realty Partnership perspective, we know here at theCUBE that Dell is trying to make consumption of what they build very, very, very simple for end-user customers. Removing the complexity of the underlying hardware. There's a saying that the hardware doesn't matter anymore. You hear things referred to as serverless or no code, low code. Those sort of abstract away from the reality of what's going on under the covers but Apex as an example from Dell allows things to be consumed as operational expense, dramatically simplifying the process of consuming that hardware. Now, if you go down to almost the concrete layer where digital realty starts up, you're looking at things like density and square footage and power consumption, right? Yeah. And so tell me, you mentioned infrastructure, tell me about the kind of optimization from a hardware standpoint that you expect to see from Dell. Yeah, it's a, you know, in the data center subset of an industry, they call it digital or mission critical infrastructure, the space, the power, the secure housing. How do you create physical isolation? How do you deal with cooling and containment? How do you deal with different physical loads? Cause some of the more dense computers likely working with Dell and some of the various semiconductors that Dell takes and wraps into intelligent compute and storage blocks, they're, you know, the specialized processing for use cases like artificial intelligence and machine learning and up required, they run very fast. They generate a lot of heat and they consume a lot of power. So that means you have to be very smart about the critical infrastructure and the type of server infrastructure storage coming together where the heat can be quickly removed. The power is obviously distributed to it so it can run as constant as fast as possible to unlock insights and processing. And then you also need to be able to deal with things like, hey, the cabling between the server and the storage has to be that when you're running parallel calculations that there's an equal distance between the cabling. Well, if I don't think about how I'm physically bringing the server storage and all of that together and then having a space that can accommodate and ensure the equal cabling in the layout. Oh, and then handle these very heavy physical computers so that physical load into the floor it becomes very problematic. So it's hidden. Most people don't understand that engineering but that's the partnership that why we're excited about with Dell is you're bringing all that critical expertise of supporting all those various types of use cases of infrastructure combinations. And then combining the engineering understanding of how do I build for the right performance, the right density, the right TCO and also do it where physical layout of having things in proximity and contiguous space can then be the way to unlock processing of data and connecting to others. Yeah, so from an end user perspective, I don't need to care about any of what you just said. All I heard was wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. Okay, okay. I will consume my Apex delivered Dell by the drink as a service, as OPEX, however I want to consume it but I can rest assured that you and the digital realty in Dell are actually taking care of those meaningful things that are happening under the hood. Maybe I'm revealing my long-term knuckle dragging hardware guy credentials when I just get that little mention in. That's a good one, you've got it. Performance, secure, compliant and I don't need to worry about it. The two of you are taking care of it and you're taking care of it for me and every major mentor around the world delivered in the experience that needs to be delivered to. So from the digital realty point of view, what are the things that not necessarily keep you up at night worrying but sort of wake you up in the morning early with a sense of renewed opportunity when it comes to the data center space. A lot of people would think, well, we're in the era of cloud, no one's building any data centers except for the monster cloud players but that's definitely not the case, is it? I mean, there's a demand for what you folks are building and delivering. What are the, so first, what's the opportunity look like? And then what are the constraints that are out there, is it dirt, is it power? What are the constraints you face? You have probably all the above is the shortest answer, right? So we're not want, want, want, want, right? But what we are is the way that the opportunity is huge because it's not one platform. There's many platforms. There isn't one business that exists today that doesn't use many applications, doesn't consume many different services both internally and externally and doesn't generate a ton of data that they may not even know where it is. So that's the exciting part. And that continues to force a requirement that says, I need to be able to connect to all those clouds which you can do at our platform. But I also need to be able to put infrastructure or the storage of data next to it and in between it. So it's like an integration approach that says, if I think physical first, think physical that's within logical proximity to where I have employees, customers, partners, I have business presence, that's what drives us. And in our industry continues to grow both and we see it in our own business. It's a double digit growth rate for both commercial oriented enterprises and service providers in the telco, cloud, or content kind of space. So it's kind of like a best of both worlds. I think that's what gets us excited. If I could take the second part of the question, what ends up worrying is like all of us, it is a physical world, physical world start with, do we have enough power? Is it durable, sustainable and secure? Is it available? Do we have the right connectivity options? Keeping things available is a full time job making it so that you can accommodate local nuances when you start going in different regions and countries and metros. There's a lot of regional policy compliance or market specific needs that have to be factored in, but you're still trying to deliver that consistent physical availability and experience. So it's a good problem to have, but it's a critical infrastructure problem that I would put in the same kind of bucket as power companies, energy companies, telecommunication companies, because it's a meeting place for all of that. So you've been in this business, not just at digital reality, but you've been in this part of the IT world for a while. How has the persona of a customer for a digital reality changed over time? Have we seen the kind of consolidation that people would expect in this space in terms of fewer, but larger customers coming in and seeking floor space? Well, I think it's been the opposite of what probably people predict. And I pause there intentionally to kind of just, being very candid and open. And it's probably why that using data as a proxy to understand is that it's a many to many world that's only getting bigger, not smaller. As much as companies consolidate, there's more that appear. Innovation is driving new businesses and new industries or the digitization of old industries, which is then creating a whole multiplier effect. So what we're seeing is we're actually seeing a rapid uptake in the enterprise side of our business, which is why I'm here and driving that, that really was much more nominal, five years ago. For being the provider of the space and capabilities for telcos and large hyperscalers continues to go. Because it's not like a once and done. It's a, I need to do this in many places. I need to continue to bring as there's a push towards the edge. I need to be able to create meeting places for all of it. And so to us, we're seeing a constant growth in more companies becoming customers on the enterprise side, more enterprises deploying in more places, solving more use cases and more service providers figuring out new ways to monetize by bringing their infrastructure and making it accessible to be connected to on our platform. So if I'm hearing you right, you're saying that people who believe that we are maybe a few years away from everything being in a single cloud are completely off base. That is not the direction that we're heading from your view, correct? We love our cloud customers. They're going to continue to grow. I would think of it, but it's not all going to one cloud. I think what you would see is that you would see where a great way to assess that and break it down is enterprise IT, Gartner's forecast, 4.2, four and a half trillion a year in spend, less than a third of that's hitting public cloud. So there's a long tail, first of all, it's not going to one cloud if people look, there's like seven or eight major players. And then you go, okay, well, what do I do if it's not in seven or eight major players? Well, then I need to put it next to it. Oh, that's why we go to a digital reality. Makes a lot of sense. Tony Bishop, digital reality. Thanks for joining us on theCUBE. Have a great Dell Technologies World. From me, Dave Nicholson. Stay tuned for more live coverage from Dell Technologies World 2022 as we resume in just a moment.


All right, this is the closest I think I'll ever get to being a celebrity, so I look forward to enjoying the next 25 minutes with you, Eric. So, credit cards. When I think of credit cards, I think of something I learned when I was at Google many, many years ago, which was called the toothbrush test. Which was when Larry Page was thinking about making an acquisition, it had to hit two criteria.  So, credit cards certainly meet that threshold, but until I met you, I thought they were quite boring. So, can you please tell us how you managed to innovate in a category that really hadn't changed for a very long time, and what your initial kind of product insight was, and how you designed something that got into our pockets so quickly? Well, one is great to be here on stage with you, Sarah, and I love the question. I mean, let's take that analogy of a toothbrush.  I hope you would throw that toothbrush away. It doesn't seem like a great product. It makes you less healthy. Now, when you think about most credit cards, the intent that most financial institutions design them with is to get you to spend more on your card. And they throw you a bone in the form of points, rewards, all that. The product literally makes you less healthy. It is designed to have you spend more than you were intending to. Ramp is designed with the opposite intent. We are known as the fastest growing corporate card in bill payment software in the U.S. We went from incorporation to three years later, over $100 million in annualized revenue. And the way we did this was actually saying your credit card should not be designed to get your company to spend more money, but actually it should be designed to help you spend less. So that sense of alignment and that sense of purpose, we came back to a product that would be with you every day, core to your company, but built in your interest. And that's helped us go start and launch and get to a velocity that very few companies have been able to reach. Yeah, one of the things as an investor that's quite exciting is to actually see a new business model. You know, you're very used to seeing marketplaces, SaaS, and it's rare that you see something where the incentives are kind of flipped in the way that you said credit cards, you think they'd want you to spend more and you're saying spend less. How did your customers initially react to that kind of switch? It's a great question. We originally had a very different approach. Our guiding mission is to figure out all the ways that companies are spending more money than they need to and more time than they ought to. And so it started as a process of discovery with our customers. Even from the first 50 that we meant, we would walk into their office and say, you know, look, we are designing products that are intended to help your company be more financially efficient. We've got some ideas around savings, but I would love to understand where are you spending more money than you would like to be. And from there, we started getting lots of different insights. And so on the customer side, I'll give you a small example. We never started ramp to be a company that is, you know, just going and rifling through receipts and automating that process. But as we were starting to ask, where really is your company spending more time? It came up time and time again. I'd be in a back of a cab. I'd pull out my card. I'd make a purchase. The guy would hand me the receipt. I'd open the expense app. It's not there. I have to wait a day. You go a day later.  You go through and you do this tens to hundreds of times per month. And we said this feels crazy. If you're trying to go and save people time and you start thinking about, there's ten steps. We can actually condense this down to zero. And so for customers of ramp, the experiences you go, maybe use an Uber. You tap your card. You get an emailed receipt. And you're done. Ramp automatically is able to pull that receipt, match it to the proper transaction, categorize it programmatically based off the behavior that you're doing as well as 10,000 plus other companies are doing and tagging their taxi receipts. And that's it. And it could be a very simple experience. But I think that for banks, you know, the question was always how to make more money. They thought very little about the process of what is your time worth. And as the world went from, you know, no phones to flip phones to iPhones, quite literally changing, the credit card was exactly the same and thought very little about the surface area around it. And so I think it really started with trying to figure out, you know, that end-to-end workflow of saving companies time, saving them money was super important. And so that's on the customer side. On our side, I think in some ways it's felt intuitive. But our very first sales hire was untraditional. It was a customer success hire. I was a consumer founder before this, so I didn't know that that was unusual. But the way that we would have conversations is how could we save you time and money? Tell us about it. We recorded every sales call and conversation. And based off of the reasons that both we were winning deals, also when companies said, you know what, it's not for us. We would listen to that, we would market, we would see the spend associated and actually even organized our own company around the process of saving companies money and time. If we could do that, prove it to them, that would unlock more spend, that would unlock more business possibilities and ultimately helped us unlock a very fast pace of growth. Yeah. And talk about fast growth. Would love to talk about how you actually can have had such fast product velocity. I mean, this is something that we're very fortunate to partner with you and we marvel at. And you and I had a long discussion about actually how you design an organization around executing so quickly on product and on the core features that you need and also innovating on things. So how do you design to keep that balance? Totally. So some of this came out of past experience. I started years ago with a consumer-oriented app designed to help consumers save money. We sold that to a credit card issuer in the United States called Capital One and once we got there, we found a place that was once very innovative, became very slow over the process of becoming a bank, becoming a large transportation where the product velocity was about once every four months, if you were really fast, you could launch a new product out. The governance that they applied to how you would regulate interest rate changes, which I would agree, you should be very careful if you're changing an interest rate, were applied to if you want to change a front page to a landing page test. It was just as difficult. And so we found that things were applied in areas that were quite inefficient. And so when we set out to build a ramp, we wanted to try to do two things. First, really respect. You know, we deal with banking partners, we move a large amount of money, and it's really not okay if your credit card doesn't work. If you get the ledger wrong and suddenly your balance is different than what you thought or thought it should be. And so part of our engineering team is structured all around correctness, all around quality tests. Actually, it's about moving slow. It's about low latency and moves at one pace. However, there's another team which is all around speed of iteration. We're trying to figure out areas where companies in their workflows are spending too much time, too much money, and the whole intent is actually measuring how quickly are we shipping new products out to customers and how much of a difference is it making. And so we've tried to adopt both the philosophy of in some parts really in the right applicable place, moving slow, doing it right, and being quite careful. But others were really the end customer need is very fast iteration. I think there's parts of Facebook that actually have it right, move fast and break things, I think is a great thing. And the reality is I don't think you have to pick one or the other. You can apply it properly. And I think, I hope that's of use for other folks who are building fintech companies out there. I think it's possible to be very fast, very innovative, while still respecting the needs of being a well run partner in financial services. Yeah, I think if you can manage that balance in such a regulated space, I think everybody else should accept the challenge. On the customer side, I'm a very happy ramp customer. And I have to say, I have never loved my credit card until now. And I think there's just so few and it's like my love for ramp and notion, these like beautifully designed products that I use every day. And I'm curious, how do you actually get customer feedback?  So, our head of product likes to quote the Henry Fordism, who knows if he really said it, but this idea of building a car, not a faster horse. Our mission is to save companies money and save them time.  But the path that ultimately get there is really one of discovery and trying to figure this problem out together. And so, we know the end goal and we're trying to figure out the process on through. I'll give you a small example. So, we talked about expense management, this field we suddenly found ourselves in as we were creating the credit card. It's critical to every purchase in the United States, at least you require to store receipts for every purchase above $75. It sounds like an incredible amount of work. And it is, we've already matched over the past three and a half years over 10 million receipts. And these were all things that people were doing manually before, an incredible amount of work. Now, as we were getting deeper and starting to discover it, we found that the most common path and what most of our competitors had done was saying, all right, well we're the credit card company, there's an expense management company, we're just going to build an integration into, let's say, concur or expensify or whatever it may be. And when we looked at the customer experience, it required not just for the controller and for the finance director to be building integrations in two systems, but for every employee from one to 10,000 up, starting to have to learn for every transaction, you log in here for the card, you log in there for the expense management report, you log into another system for accounting. And so we actually made, I would say what is time was a bit of an unusual trade-off and we said we are not going to integrate into it. And it reduced our TAM. There were a lot of companies that said, you know, why aren't you using this industry standard for expense management? And the reason for that was we saw the path to actually take something from a multi-step, very complex workflow down to zero steps and really fully automate all the way through. And by taking that hard trade-off, thinking from a first principle's base is looking at the interest of the customer, they are just trying to get their job done, go back to work, save time, run their company more efficiently, and if you could go and change the setup by reducing the number of steps, that would be a far better outcome for customers. And so in some ways, like we certainly try to be opinionated and those trade-offs save us from work, allow us to focus and move fast on core areas that really matter. But ultimately I think it's really simple. It's have your guiding vision. For us, it's save money and save time for customers. Stay true to that. Be open to learnings both in your own views which you hear from customers and build against it and I hope it works out. So far so good as far as we can tell. One thing I mixed that I always like kind of contrarian ideas and approaches. And one thing that you've really done is actually hire previous founders into your company. And a lot of people from Ramp already have gone on to found their own companies. I'm hoping we can coin the Ramp mafia today as others of great fame. And I'm just curious to talk a little bit about kind of your recruiting philosophy and how you've been open to kind of bringing in founders and supporting them in their journeys. So it's a couple sets of things. So at one point in our history actually over 33% of every single person at Ramp was a former founder. Today, you know, we are 400 people and still double digit percentage of folks at Ramp have founded a former company and I think it's incredible. One, I think so many people dream and aspire one day to start their own company to build something that matters. And one of the best ways to do it is to be surrounded by people who've done it at a company that's growing but people who've sort of faced the void and figure out what are we going to do, how are we going to get over this thing. And so not only is it useful functionally in solving these problems but it's an incredible asset in attracting extraordinary people. I'll put it this way, I mean four years ago there was no company, we were not yet formed, we didn't exist. Now there's a selection of people and I think it's easy to forget that with every single recruits they're going through that maybe your LinkedIn, maybe the company page and they're figuring out who else are they going to work with. And if you take talent seriously and you try to find former founders, you try to find really spiky people from the perspective of a job applicant, it makes it much easier, it reduces the activation energy to say I'm going to join this company and I'm going to be there. And so on the one side I think recruiting former founders is an incredible asset to help your company move at higher velocity, attract extraordinary people. And last I think for everyone here, everyone in some way maybe is the hero of their own story and has dream and aspirations for themselves and their families and one day it may make sense for someone who passes through and builds something great at Ramp to go and start their own company and I think a lot of founders are secretly terrified of the conversation where some of their best people say I've got to go, there's a company that's calling me, I want to go and start it and I think there's some part of it that's true but I think that's a part of life, I think it's a part of the deal if you're trying to bring in extraordinary people, being there on that other side one I think is just the right thing as a person to be there for folks who are following their own journeys. But second I think in some ways actually accelerates the ability to recruit people who do want to push, who do want to try and dare and create new products and do things in a different way and so I think it goes hand in hand but you know at the same time I'll put it this way, I mean we are not first, I think in our industry most of my competitors, their founders were top hats, they were alive in the 1800s, it was a very different kind of environment and even in our spend management category we're the youngest in our space and what has allowed us to have our product velocity in a faster rate of execution was recruiting these founders and extraordinary people and so look there's things that come with it but I highly recommend it and you know hopeful for anyone at ramp who over the course of the coming year starts their own company. I hope many, many more people do it, a founder apprenticeship if you will. One of my kind of personal most deeply held beliefs is that there are phenomenal entrepreneurs everywhere in the world and not just in concentrated pockets and that's one of the reasons I recently moved to Europe and opened CO2's office in London so I hope many will come visit in the audience and very happy to be a customer internationally of ramp and so I'm just curious what your international expansion plans look like, I think you can use ramp functionality in 176 countries if that's right but could you talk to us about your presence today and like how that will expand in the future? It's the way that companies are built and the way people work is fundamentally altered I don't think that makes me unique in saying it but we see it so as fast as ramp has grown over the past year international spending has grown 50% faster and so the dynamics of how companies are formed, where people are located is fundamentally altered and so not only do companies need a hybrid way of moving money abroad facilitating expense management in a distributed manner but I actually think that the best talent pools, they are distributed they are in other countries and so it's a huge priority at ramp and so one of the biggest launches that we had this month was we announced ramp international and so all ramp customers are able to first make bill payments in 176 countries in over 80 currencies, just as a click button, you can upload an invoice whether it's one or 100 at once, we programmatically match we're able to decode in multiple languages, match it to your accounting software, you can remit payments abroad you can reimburse employees abroad and so if you got employees in different workforces you can send it to their personal bank accounts and of course our credit cards we're partnered with Visa, you can swipe these cards and use them anywhere that Visa has accepted and today even as a young company we're moving into the hundreds of millions of dollars every year from US companies abroad internationally so it's a huge strategic priority for us for any folks who have hybrid companies presence in the US, you can use ramp today and we hope in the very near future even for international companies you'll be able to use, partner with and experience ramp. I look forward to that and we have a lot of founders, we're on the founder stage after all and I'm curious Eric what are the things that you wish you had known when you were at earlier stages of ramp that you would share with these young entrepreneurs I think a couple of things so the second time around we did something very different than the first company which helped us move a lot faster than we did before and so it was a quirk, we had our first board meeting it was day 133, it was in the summer of 2019 and we were a little bit nervous to go into our first board meeting with our outside board director and we put the day on it, we said it is day 133 cut us some slack, we've only been around for 133 days, we're launching our first customer next week but we'll be there removing quickly and the board found it very funny sort of cute in a way and the next time it was 66 days later and we kept it, it was day 199 and it became one of the most important cultural attributes of ramp where we started to count the days and it was not about it's day 1340 it was more thinking about the passage of time with every 60 days are we getting leverage, are we moving the same speed slower or faster, I think a lot of startups are really about incremental small moves that help you grow and accelerate a little bit faster and if you're able to do, let's say this grow 20% every month, in the very small days it may be going from $1000 in revenue to 1200 but if you keep doing that over the course of years you're going to be one of the fastest growing companies and frankly the largest companies out there and I think as a first time entrepreneur there's a lot of imposter syndrome, there's a lot of feeling of what I do matter in the context of there's so many large logos the scale of this conference, the scale of the world is so big how can I send it apart and I think for me what I wish I had known the first time I was starting my company is you don't need to boil the ocean of progress consistently, each and every 30 days is more than enough and if you just do that and you put yourself in the position of letting time become an asset for your company just continue to compound, you will go a very, very far away next I think in narrowing the focus from years to actually just next week, to actually just this next 30 days it's very clarifying I think as a first time founder it's confusing to say alright well I know I'm a large company, do I go out and fundraise, do I try to go get press, do I go and buy ads do I go and call people up for advice or I do door to door series it's very hard to figure out and constrain the problem and figure out what do you do first but actually by reducing the focus and saying we're going to try to grow 10% this week it's very clarifying, you can say with this tactic we can grow 80% likelihood we'll get there just do that and you start thinking both in the here and now prioritizing what matters saying no to things that don't and over time you're able to manage that progress and so I would just say narrow the focus, count the days a little bit of progress with each and every few weeks you're going to go a very, very long way. Yeah there's a saying in Spanish I'll spare the audience my Spanish but it's like step by step and one goes very far. Well we've talked a lot about kind of how you hire how you ship product quickly, when you look forward to what's new we've talked about international expansion, what are the things that you are most looking forward to and we as users of ramp can look forward to. Oh my god we've we've barely just started we have a lot of work to do so our main focus back to it again is saving companies money and time. One of the themes that we heard time and time again as we talked to customers is you know suddenly I'm 2025 people and my price isn't here enlisted on the website it's contact sales and the more companies that we spent time with we would go and ask what are you paying for not to pick on Salesforce and see their sign in the audience what are you paying and you get one price you ask another company you get another price there is an incredible amount of price discrimination out in the world and it's only growing I believe. Now one of my favorite products as a consumer is a Google product one kind of in your story it's the company of it's Waze. Now I think MapQuest was a great company they would recommend if you want to go from point A to point B you could enter the address get to where you needed to go that was fine but Waze figured out was if you were able to crowdsource that data you could benefit everyone on the network and suddenly you were able to go around the traffic jam find the most efficient route there and when I think about pricing and the way that most companies are actually getting charged it's something like that people kind of know maybe there's traffic somewhere maybe there's someone getting a better rate but my rate is fine I'll call up a friend we'll hit the subscription I'll negotiate with the sales person to get 10% off and I think there's an enormous amount of price discrimination out there one of the goals that Ramp has is to always be acting in the interest of customers now we do this today in the form of we show you redundant spend we'll say to your company you have a thousand employees you're spending on seven sets of project management software maybe you're spending on Asana and Basecamp and Trello maybe you only need one and are only using one we'll show you when there's better publicly advertised rates but actually starting to get back into can you start to show and use crowdsource data to be able to help companies is something I'm very excited about next money movement there's a hundred and twenty trillion dollars of B2B payments around the globe and if you actually examine how most companies are moving money there's an incredible amount of money will work it's a Slack message here it's a Gmail message there if you're FTX you're sending emojis to approve reimbursement requests and it's crazy it's not auditable it's not simple it's not porn it's not workflows and I think one of the mega trends that's happening in financial services is you know if you were a bank you could move money you could store money if you were a software player sorry you could sell software now suddenly you're able to do both and you're able to get into the workflows and actually really fully digitizing orchestrating how companies are making the decisions around what purchase of the make the intelligence to know what things cost the automation to help you close your books faster are all things I believe your financial partner should do and in the future I think they're not just going to be money banks they're going to be time banks there should be people thinking about actually for your company how to be a much more efficient version of yourselves and we think and hope that ramp will be leading the charge I have to say what's surprising listening to you is like from where you sit you've expanded in so many directions right like to help people thinking about their softwares but it's a very broad how did you at the from the start years ago did you know the directions you wanted to expand in the adjacent markets and products or is it an evolutionary process where we do this and actually we have all this data across all these categories we can share across companies how did that evolve it's it's been an evolution I mean for us you know we never set this out to launch a credit card and sell more cards it was to save you time and money and through that process we discovered and started to learn what were the adjacencies that cause companies to spend too much and so I think for us really our view is you're a finance teams you need to do one thing every month which is close your books it's 12 times per year how you move money and how you spend that's just a means to an end it's not the process and so even our process was making that simple workflow simpler taking that broader and as we've gone into new verticals in the eyes of the customers it's actually reduced the number of tools they need to use you no longer need 3, 4, 5 sets of software a card expense management bank account bill payment software just to do one thing which is run your business get back to business close your books you just need one you just need ramp and we have a long way to go to make things simpler but super excited grateful to be partnered you know one just quick plug for code to I know a lot of people know you as a growth stage fund you actually found us when we were 11 days old you've been a critical partner in every round that we've had as a company and we feel super grateful to be partners with you well Eric Kitos that's the one finish word I've learned thank you very much and we can't leave the stage without my complimenting your Mondrian sweater which is very chic thank you all very much for joining us thank you hope this was useful


Now you're saying somebody's saying, just say no. That's what Nancy, let me come down here to talk about, is just say no. Where that came from, Nancy was appearing before a group of students, students like yourself, and a girl in the audience told them, what do we do when someone offers a drug and just say no. And the day they are over 10,000, just say no comes. From schools and campuses across the country. Well, I know that I've got to move on and get over to the forum and the meeting on this subject that I just mentioned. But again, I just want to say, very heartwarming. You make me very proud indeed, and I'm proud to be here today with this warm welcome. Thank you very much. 73% of those employees using this to satisfy your statewide, I status the governor's council on alcohol and drug abuse among children in youth by executive order on January 29, 1986. This council supports education and prevention and treatment programs to reduce alcohol and drug abuse problems among children in youth and helps develop legislative programs and public existing within the civic organization. I propose to you that we pool our knowledge as we run the day. We pool our knowledge and resources, share our experience, and develop a state in helping to reduce financial human costs. The federal government is not enough to buy a pro-screen program for this problem. I believe any program that is going to be affected must have the involvement and cooperation of all elements of our society. Educational institutions, rehabilitation centers, as well as law enforcement.  St. Matthews said, blessed are they that hunger and thirst, we hunger and thirst, for how we can bring more people into that fold, how we can find some process, learn from each other as we've done this morning, as we're doing today, sharing with each other. We hunger and thirst for how we can help people. As I mentioned earlier today, I had the like so many Americans. We watched with greater and greater apprehension during the years, when too much of our media and too many of our cultural and political leaders sent out the message that using illegal drugs was okay. Well, thank God those days are over. A few weeks ago, we learned that America's students are saying no as never before. For 13 years, we have conducted annual surveys of thousands of graduating seniors in high schools across our country. What drugs have they used? How often? What do they think about drugs? Since the surveying began, a substantially smaller proportion of high school seniors, one-third smaller, acknowledged current use of cocaine than did the year before. Use of marijuana and amphetamines is also dropping. The professional basketball court may seem like a long way from the average officer factory. But as I heard those personal stories before I came out here, I couldn't help thinking how similarly we're to a story about drugs in the workplace that I was planning to take. A few years ago, you're in minutes of a great career swanning on drugs. Today, David Johnson is putting his life together. We all pray for the success and we have this warning. In his words, you never feel like you're going to be the one to get hooked, he says. The end of it, and it's very hard to get out of it. David Johnson was an extraordinary athlete, but a long-term typical on-the-job of a drug user. Injury and accident problems don't want to work around someone who gets high during the day. Perhaps because drug users act the way they tell researchers they feel, they don't want to be at work, period. One other thing, as I heard firsthand today when it's all over, drug users look back on the wreckage of their careers and their lives like David Thompson, their advice is, never, never try.


Shiva, the force of the destroyer. Shiva is interesting because just as he is known as the destroyer, he is also known as the redeemer. Shiva is the force of destruction to that which is old and brings renewal, recalibration, or restoration to that which no longer works in reality. Shiva is often represented as dancing because through him represents the dance of destruction and recreation which takes place constantly at fundamental levels of existence. This is actually quite significant because the deeper one goes into quantum mechanics, one learns that the waves and particles which make up our energetic reality matrix are constantly dancing together in and out of formation in different patterns, creation, destruction, rebirth, and renewal. In 2004, this very idea was memorialized at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland when India gifted a two-meter-tall statue of Shiva for the site.