What it means to build for the long run

"We're going to look back at 2026 as the year that every single business was up for grabs."

Founder and host of Founders Podcast David Senra cited this quote from a recent conversation he had with Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke.

History suggests Lütke is not wrong. Periods of technological change have always determined which businesses win and which don't.

This month, Senra and Ramp co-founder and CEO Eric Glyman sat down with Colossus founder and CEO Patrick O'Shaughnessy to discuss what separates companies that adapt well to technological change from the ones that don’t.

Here are key takeaways from the conversation.

Don’t sell a product, sell an enduring service

Winning businesses know what they’re really selling: not an ephemeral product, but a lasting value proposition.

Senra pointed to the example of Cornelius Vanderbilt, who built his first fortune on steamships. But when railroads emerged, Vanderbilt sold off his steamship assets and went all in on what he thought was going to be the technology of his day. Despite the pivot, he stayed true to his core value proposition: reliable transportation.

"The railroads were by far the largest industry in America shortly thereafter," Senra noted. "This story really is analogous to the internet."

Glyman highlighted American Express as a similar story in a different era. American Express launched as a Pony Express, moving money safely across the country when banks couldn't be trusted to. Today the company sells corporate cards and restaurant reservations. Glyman attributed American Express’s success to the company’s knowledge of what it actually sold: trust.

"Great companies often understand they are not selling a product," Glyman said. "They are selling something enduring."

The question Glyman thinks is relevant to founders: "even if the form factor of the product changes, will the service you're selling endure?"

Know your mission and work backwards from it

Every decision should flow from one question: why does the business exist? Figure out your why, then build the business.

To Senra, founders who build lasting companies often build what they themselves want to see in the world. The founder of Major Food Group, the company behind the famed Carbone and Torrisi, started 77 restaurants and bars, 76 of which are still operating. His motivation: making the food he wants to eat, and creating the venues he wants to go to. "He is his own customer," Senra said.

According to Senra, mission often flows from genuine interest. "Fighting against your personality or natural interest is just a very bad idea," he said. The founders who win in the long-run are the ones who do something they can’t stop doing anyway.

Ramp’s founders were also inspired by the idea of building more of what they wanted to see in the world.

“Being your own customer is the ultimate form of alignment,” Glyman said. “You understand what you, and others like you, want and you work towards it.”

Eric Glyman, David Senra, and Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Align your goal with your customers’

Match your business’s incentives with those of your customers.

Glyman noticed a structural misalignment of incentives within the financial services industry. Customers wanted to optimize for the money in their bank accounts. But banks wanted to optimize around reward systems, encouraging customers to spend more to earn more. "Both sides were trying to outsmart each other," he noted. "How is it possible that in this deeply profitable industry, everyone in some sense was conspiring against the customer?”

Reversing this trend became the founding principle behind Ramp: save people time and money.

Use velocity as a competitive advantage

The key to success often lies in relentless productivity. That requires velocity — moving fast in the right direction.

Before founding Ramp, Glyman saw firsthand how hard it is for large organizations to ship quickly. While working at Capital One, Glyman built a tool that enforced Amazon's late-shipment guarantee on behalf of customers. Within a day of launching, the tool had collectively saved customers 20 years of Amazon Prime subscriptions.

The CEO praised the launch. But every idea in the organization required sign-off across legal, product, and marketing.

That experience shaped how Glyman thinks about building. He draws a distinction between two kinds of creators: Michelangelo, who spent months producing a single, perfect piece of work, and Warhol, who made something new every day. Before AI, a lot of engineering resembled Michelangelo’s approach — slow, deliberate, mathematically perfect. But the world might be moving closer to Warhol’s approach: move fast and build things.

Glyman’s thinking at Ramp: "We are going to structure the organization for maximum velocity and iterate quickly.”

Hire for high-potential early, and cultivate talent over time

In a talent-dense market, search in pools others haven't considered yet, take a bet on strong potential early, and develop talent over the long-horizon.

Glyman said the candidates everyone is looking for have already been found: LinkedIn recruiters read their resumes, track their promotions, and price the market. The hiring edge comes from identifying strong candidates before others actively seek them.

“Every startup knows how to find the best intern their junior summer,” Glyman said. “But very few people are looking to find the smartest freshmen on campus, give them a winter internship, and then keep up with them for years.”

It’s also valuable to look for signals that don’t show up in standard recruiting funnels. Glyman’s example: one of Ramp's most productive engineers was widely known in the Minecraft private server community a decade ago. "Recruiters are usually not looking for that," he said.

Once you find these builders, give them far more responsibility than might seem reasonable. Glyman recalled a Palantir leader’s phrasing of this idea: the Bruce Banner School of Management. "You find someone with a lot of potential and you just shoot them with a ton of gamma rays," Glyman said.

"The ones who make it become the Hulk."

Rebuild the company as if you started it today

Ask if your company is AI-native, and consider if it would still win if you started it today.

“If you're an incumbent, you will get beaten by somebody that wants to do exactly what you're doing, but starting afresh and as AI-native,” Lütke told Senra in a recent conversation.

To Senra, Lütke is a founder rebuilding his company from scratch for the AI era. “He is spending his nights building agents, asking what Shopify would look like if you started today with a blank sheet of paper,” Senra said.

The imperative to adapt and rebuild applies to any company operating today, like Ramp. Parts of Ramp's codebase are already AI-written, AI-maintained, and updated from customer feedback with almost no humans in the loop. "The majority of PRs have been written by AI," Glyman said.

The question Glyman keeps returning to: if an agent had perfect information and full autonomy, would it still choose Ramp?

"If the answer is yes, I think we have a shot. It’s a timeless idea to always want more for less." Glyman said. "If the answer is no, we should lose.”

Simple ideas compound over time

Glyman and Senra emphasized first principles and consistency over the long-term.

Glyman summarized what has worked at Ramp: “Taking simple ideas very seriously and doing it for a long time.”

Senra, too, highlighted that strong outcomes often come from playing the long-game: Lütke started by trying to sell snowboards online and spent 21 years expanding on the same ecommerce idea, and Ford took 20 years to buy out every shareholder and own the company outright.

"Time carries most of the weight," Senra said. "Just find an ambition that you actually believe in, and then just stay there."