How Ramp Built Its Creator Program Without a CMO

Ramp’s creator program runs from finance creators hosting monthly masterclasses to Super Bowl ads and live stunts, and it does it without a traditional CMO. Ramp treats creators as part of its marketing team, and it reached a $44B valuation in June 2026 with marketing run by a co-founder and a set of small teams.

It’s the most ambitious creator program in our teardown series, and also the hardest to copy. We mapped the founders, team and creators behind it, and here’s how it was built in four steps, with what I’d take from it and what I’d leave.

How Does Ramp Run Marketing Without a CMO?

Ramp did hire a CMO in 2022, but it doesn’t run marketing that way now. Co-founders Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh have Karim managing marketing alongside risk and operations, and their view is that everyone at Ramp is a builder (the careers page says even the marketers code).

George Bonaci, who runs growth, put it plainly in June 2026: “We do not have a traditional CMO or a head of all of marketing like other companies do.”

How Does Ramp’s Team Run Marketing Like Engineering?

Marketing is split across small teams. Growth reports to Karim and owns pipeline, product marketing sits inside product, and brand sits with design and is told to be bold. Geoff Charles, Ramp’s CPO, treats marketing as an engineering problem.

George’s events team has grown from 2 people to 25. Ara Kharazian turns Ramp’s own spend data into reports, including one in August 2026 on what AI companies spend on influencers. Paul Jun leads brand, and Kendall Tucker runs creative experimentation.

How Did Creators Become a Growth Channel for Ramp?

Through finance creators with the exact audience Ramp sells to. Nicolas Boucher has hosted Ramp masterclasses since September 2025, and so have Oana Labes, Bojan Radojicic, Christian Wattig, Paul Barnhurst, Carl Seidman and Christian Martinez.

Jason Staats and Matt Navarra post for Ramp on LinkedIn too. On Instagram, Ross Pomerantz, Corporate Natalie, Joe Fenti, Johnny Hilbrant, The Swiss Chris, Jason Yeager, Sammi Tannor Cohen, Jacob Capozzi and Jessica Rose Hood post under the RampPartner tag.

The 18 creators on our map have more than 8.2M followers between them, over 140 times what the founders have on LinkedIn. This is the part of the program that does the steady work: CFOs and controllers learning from people they already follow, every month, with Ramp in the room.

How Did Ramp’s Stunts Turn Creators Into the Cast?

After a Super Bowl ad with Saquon Barkley made in seven days, Kendall’s team put Brian Baumgartner, Kevin from The Office, in a box in Flatiron Plaza for 8 hours. Creators including The Rizzler rotated in, and Kendall reported 214M views, a 4x ROAS and a CPM of roughly $0.

Her reasoning is worth reading twice: “The alpha in doing something weird, wild, and/or creative is that people will share it for free.”

A funeral for the penny at the Lincoln Memorial followed, then the Brian Bowl and a Broadway musical with Billy Porter and Billy Zane, and next up are Tony Hawk and Bam Margera on the NYSE trading floor.

Then in August 2026 a 1.3M-follower Instagram account called The Kumar Method came back with reels co-authored with Ramp, which Ramp counts at more than 300M views. Ramp’s own page about it only asks, “was ramp behind it? we’ll never tell.”

Treating creators as part of the team looks like this in practice: Jessica Rose Hood had a reel about the penny funeral live two days after it, and Ramp’s influencer manager sits with the producers.

Should You Copy Ramp’s Creator Program?

Mostly no, and I’d say that about the stunts in particular. Ramp has crossed $1B in annualised revenue, has a brand people already recognise and a creative team built for speed, and a Super Bowl ad made in seven days isn’t a plan for a Series A company.

What I would copy:

1. Partner with the niche creators your buyers learn from. Ramp’s finance masterclasses reach CFOs through people like Nicolas Boucher and Christian Wattig, and that works at any budget.
2. Keep creators close to every moment. A reel live two days after an event only happens when creators sit inside the team’s planning, and that’s a process choice before it’s a budget one.
3. Give one person clear ownership. Without a CMO, Ramp still has someone whose job is creative experimentation and someone whose job is influencers.

Ramp has made creators part of everything it does, from the pipeline to the Super Bowl. We help B2B companies do the first part well, with creator programs we run end to end on LinkedIn and beyond, and our Hopae case study shows that niche-creator approach reaching enterprise buyers. All our case studies are here.

For a company that found its paid and SEO channels had stopped compounding, read our Replit teardown.