Leo Mehr - Ramp’s $44B Bet on Services

The hardest part of shipping an AI agent isn't the agent. It's getting it access to data buried across a dozen internal systems, and capturing the tribal knowledge that runs a company but was never written down.I sat down with Leo Mehr, Director of Engineering at Ramp (a $44B-valued company), who runs the forward deployed engineering team that walks into large companies and replaces real, painful workflows with agents. We got into why the model is usually the easy part, and why data access is "the longest pole in the tent." Leo also made the case that nobody wants to buy another piece of software anymore — every B2B company is about to become either an agent-friendly API or white-glove service for everyone, and the middle dies. We talked about whether a services business can actually be venture-scale, why he thinks the AI labs won't eat every startup (it comes down to incentives, not better models), why the biggest customers are often the worst ones to build for, and how the traits that made a great engineer ten years ago aren't the ones that matter now.We talked about all of that and a lot more. You don't wanna miss this one!Chapters00:00 Intro01:11 Meet Leo Maier01:46 Building Ramp FDE02:43 Why FDE Exists04:23 Early Mandate Fires06:07 FDE and Core Engineering07:48 Enterprise Bet Pays11:10 Ramp Monetization16:05 Services Are the New Software18:11 AI Agents and APIs23:11 Pricing for Outcomes26:35 Human Labor TAM32:50 VCs and Rollups36:50 Common AI Workflow Pain38:04 Agent Data Context38:55 Go-to-Market Motion40:36 Customer Engagement Lifecycle43:51 Finance Intelligence Layer47:20 Who You Compete Against48:09 The Future of Consulting51:44 Will Humans Still Code?54:37 How Engineering Teams Will Evolve57:36 Hiring Change59:36 Should You Study Computer Science?01:06:10 The Bull Case and the Risks01:13:44 Why Ramp