7th August, 2025. One hundred days. I'm burning the boats.

I first met Calvin in 2016. Karim and I had just launched Paribus. We weren’t a big company. Our office was my kitchen table. So when an email from a 17-year-old high school dropout landed in my inbox asking for an internship, I skimmed by it. Thankfully, Karim didn’t! - Admitted into MIT at age 16 - Code running on the International Space Station - Top 20 in the country in the Putnam Math Competition Calvin arrived on his first day in a T-shirt he wore representing the United States in a programming competition. Three weeks later he’d built an AI model to automate refund decisions. This was years before people knew what AI even was. Fast forward four years. Karim and I start Ramp. Our first phone call? Persuading Calvin to join as a founding engineer. The challenge: make filing an expense as easy as taking a photo of a receipt! Fortunately, Calvin looks at hard problems the way a dog looks at a bone. I watched him come back to the office every night, just as I was leaving, Wendy’s in hand, no small talk, working because he wanted to, only pausing to watch The Yankees’ playoff run. Eighty thousand expenses a day are now submitted using the code he wrote. Each one takes just 15 seconds, not 15 minutes. That’s 20,000 hours of work saved every day! Why am I telling this story? I think founders get too much credit. The single most important thing we do is hire people smarter than us. Phil Knight had Jeff Johnson, who drove to track meets across the Pacific Northwest and sold the first 3,250 pairs of Nike’s from the boot of his car. That’s why you’re wearing Nikes. Steve Jobs had Ken Kocienda, who mapped thousands of thumb taps to solve the seemingly impossible problem of touch-typing on glass. That’s why you have an iPhone in your pocket. Calvin is one of those people. Who wouldn’t want him to file your expenses?

Harry Dry is the best copywriter I know. He's built a 130,000-person newsletter teaching people how to do it, and by the end of this interview, you'll be at least a Green Belt in copywriting. Some of his rules for writing: 1) A great sentence is a good sentence made shorter. 2) Writing great copy begins with having something to say in the first place. 3) Copy is like food. How it looks matters. 4) Since the look of copy matters so much, don't write copy in Google Docs. Write it in Figma (so you can write and design at the same time). 5) Kaplan's Law of Words: Any word that isn't working for you is working against you. 6) You know a paragraph is ready to ship when there's nothing left to remove. It's like a Jenga tower. The entire thing should collapse if you remove something. 7) Make a promise in the title so the reader knows exactly what they're going to get if they click. Then, deliver on the promise. 8) The three laws of copywriting: (1) Make it concrete, (2) make it visual, and (3) make it falsifiable. 9) Make it concrete: Don't be abstract. For an example, say you're writing about habits. Don't talk about "productive routines." That's abstract. Write about "waking up at 6am to write" instead. It's concrete — and much more vibrant. 10) Make it visual: People see in pictures. This is why instead of memorizing card numbers directly, world memory champions memorize cards by turning them into pictures and then back to cards. 11) Make it falsifiable: When you write a sentence that's true or false, you put your head on the chopping block, which makes people sit up in their seat. 12) When has a falsifiable statement resonated? Galileo got sentenced to a decade of house arrest for saying that the earth spins around the sun. That's a falsifiable sentence. But nobody would've done anything if he'd said that the earth has a harmonious connection with a celestial object. 13) Write with the delete key. Using fewer words lets you be more impactful with the words you keep. 14) The job of a sales page is to make a bold claim at the top. Then spend the rest of the page backing up what you've said... with a ridiculous amount of proof. 15) If your competitor could've written the sentence, cut it. 16) Good copy is differentiated. Here's an example: Elon Musk shouldn't write "The Cybertruck is the world's best truck." Ford or Dodge can write that sentence. But only Elon can write: "The Cybertruck is tougher than an F-150 and faster than a Porsche." 17) Some days, the writing comes easily. Some days, it takes sweat. The reader doesn't care if you wrote for two minutes, two hours, or two days. The ink looks the same. 18) Great copy reads like your customer wrote it. Talk to them. That's just an introduction to the copywriting philosophy of @harrydry. I've shared the full interview below. I recommend you watch this one because we pull from so many visual references and do a lot of screen sharing. If you'd rather watch on YouTube, I've shared the link in the reply tweets.