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Karim Atiyeh

Karim Atiyeh is a co-founder and CTO at Ramp[1]. He holds a B.A. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Harvard University and an M.S. in Computer Science from Harvard University, where he was a Siebel Scholar[9][10]. He served as a teaching fellow for CS50 at Harvard University[7]. Before co-founding Ramp, Atiyeh founded Paribus Co., where he served as founder and CTO from 2014 to 2019; the company was sold to Capital One[5]. He also worked at Oliver Wyman from 2011 to 2014[6]. Atiyeh participated in Y Combinator's S15 cohort[8]. His LinkedIn profile is available at https://www.linkedin.com/in/karimatiyeh/[2].

Founded

Insights & ideas

Karim Atiyeh centers his thinking on building consumer-grade user experience for business software, arguing that most enterprise tools of the previous generation were designed only for decision makers, solving one person's problem while giving everyone else at a company a small daily paper cut [1]. His stated goal for Ramp was to apply the polish and ease of something like Instagram to business software, treating design obsession as a core differentiator even in the company's early days when it lacked credibility or social proof [1].

Operationally, he describes a recurring practice of scrutinizing every customer interaction, whether an email or a form, and asking whether the answer to a question can be inferred rather than asked, or whether a task can be completed automatically rather than delegated to the user [1]. Examples include prefilling forms, embedding submission fields directly in emails instead of directing customers to a website, and automatically retrying failed payments instead of asking customers to do so themselves [1]. He frames this as an ongoing obsession with minimizing the time users spend in the product, improved continuously through accumulating data on user behavior [1].

Experience

  1. Co-Founder, Co-CEO Ramp
    RampMar 2019 to Present
  2. Founder, CTO (Sold to Capital One)
    Paribus Co.2014 to 2019
  3. Powerpoint and Excel
    Oliver WymanAug 2011 to Sep 2014
  4. CS50 Teaching Fellow
    Harvard UniversitySep 2009 to Jan 2010

Education

Media & appearances

In the news

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