It took Ramp CEO and cofounder Eric Glyman and me only about ten minutes to get to Franz Kafka.
The early 20th century novelist, who worked most of his life at an insurance company in Prague, knew a thing or two about exasperating bureaucracies. A century later, it's a problem that persists—and is one that Glyman is especially interested in solving.
"The companies we serve are all sizes, from small to Shopify and Airbnb, and everything in-between," said Glyman. “If you really look at all the tools they use to make payments and manage the money part of their businesses, it’s kind of Kafka-esque. 20 to 30 [tools] is pretty typical. 'We use this for bill payments, we use this for cards. We use this to store money, we use this for receivables, and then we use this to log approvals.' You listen to it, and it keeps getting crazier."
Ramp, founded in 2019, has earned its $7.65 billion valuation by working to make the universal agony of expense reporting less painful, and by expanding to include bill payments, procurement, and travel management. Now, Glyman is taking things to the next level: Ramp is launching its very own app store, Fortune has learned. The Ramp App Center, which goes live today, will let third-party developers build specialized apps that integrate directly into Ramp’s platform, while providing Ramp customers with a central hub to browse various add-ons.
It’s an interesting move, not least because running a successful app store isn’t really something you can do alone. It's also a big move: App stores, in the modern sense established by Apple in 2008—and more recently a source of legal headaches for the iPhone maker—are the province of companies with gravitational pull; an ecosystem of customers and developers that comprise the app store’s value.
Glyman says Ramp, which counts more than 25,000 customers, and the fintech market that Ramp operates in, are ideally suited for something like this. "In a lot of tech ecosystems partnering with other companies can be unusual," he says. "But as a fintech provider you can't even get started without partnering with banks and payment platforms."
Out of the gate, the Ramp App Center will have more than 200 "integrations" from more than 75 partners, including NetSuite, QuickBooks, Puzzle, Digits, Campfire, Ironclad, and Carta. This will both build on what’s already possible with Ramp via its API, while adding more integration capabilities to the platform. These integrations will offer Ramp customers one-click access to various business tools. Specific apps will only be available to Ramp Plus customers, but Ramp isn't taking a cut or charging extra for any one app. Access to the App Center isn't gated behind pricing. It’s an opportunity for developers to, once on the app store, monetize in part by leveraging Ramp’s seal of approval. The idea, says Glyman, is to streamline tedious but necessary back office tasks for customers, giving them more time to focus on their core business.
For Redpoint Ventures managing director Logan Bartlett, a key sign of the App Center’s success will be when examples arise of businesses that are "turbocharged" by the app store. "I’d love it if we also have early signs of businesses that possibly wouldn't have existed if not for the creation of this," Bartlett says.
"A year from now, success for me would have nothing to do with monetization," Bartlett added. "It would be to receive independent validation from net new companies and from net new use cases…The benefit to Ramp is an obvious one, that serving as a nexus within an ecosystem will lead to ancillary stickiness."
Glyman seems to rather like Kafka, so I raised to him my personal favorite Kafka line (or at least one that’s frequently attributed to the melancholic novelist): "All revolutions evaporate leaving only the slime of a new bureaucracy." I asked Glyman: How do you prevent ultimately becoming the problem you seek to solve? He has a sense of humor about it, and I appreciate he's willing to engage with the existential question.
“You’re the voice inside my head, saying ‘how do we not become the enemy!’” Glyman laughs. “I think time will tell, but it has to do with principles, and how companies are organized…So long as we're trying to hold ourselves accountable to truly showing with each new launch and each new capability that we're simplifying processes. But this is one of those things where we just have to take that test every year and report back.”
Glyman and I laugh at the idea of an Annual Kafka Test, but maybe it's a good idea for all kinds of startups. If anyone's looking to take a Kafka Test, I'm here.
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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