Ramp's 14-Year-Old Intern and the Case for Self-Taught Builders

Ramp, a fintech worth $60 billion, once hired a 14-year-old intern. The company found the teenager after an app he built purely for fun caught the attention of roughly a million people on Twitter. The story of Ramp's 14-year-old intern comes straight from Co-CEO Eric Glyman.

A 14-Year-Old Intern and a Viral App

Glyman shared it in a November 5 interview with Alex Konrad, founder and editor of Upstairs Media. He explained how Ramp evaluates engineering talent beyond traditional qualifications. The wider tech industry is recalibrating how it spots talent too, since AI is changing what a junior role even means.

“We had an intern who was 14 years old,” Glyman said. “Part of how we found him was he had built his own app for fun that was genuinely useful, and a million people saw it on Twitter and interacted with it. There was no one who was telling him, ‘Hey, go build this project.’ He just was interested in it.” Glyman did not identify the teenager or say when he worked at Ramp.

Minecraft Servers as a Sign of Initiative

Ramp looks for developers who have pursued projects on their own, even when that experience doesn't come from a conventional job. According to Glyman, he wants strong evidence that someone has built something independently and shown drive without anyone telling them to. That trait matters even more as AI erodes the entry-level tasks that once trained new engineers.

In a separate November 3 interview with Blackstone, Glyman said Ramp also looks for developers who got their start running Minecraft servers as teenagers. Some teens built their own servers before high school, gaining practical programming experience long before entering the workforce.

Glyman acknowledged the approach has limits. Talented candidates who haven't had the time, resources, or opportunity to build something independently could be overlooked, just as the entry-level rungs of the industry are thinning out.

Small Teams and a 28-Year-Old CTO

In June, Ramp appointed Rahul Sengottuvelu as chief technology officer at 28. He replaced co-founder Karim Atiyeh, who became co-CEO alongside Glyman. Sengottuvelu joined Ramp through a 2023 acquisition and later led its applied AI team, and he was already building AI products before ChatGPT became a household name. In its leadership announcement, Ramp pointed to that experience and his ability to make tough technical decisions, as the company was putting AI to work in more of its products and day-to-day operations.

Glyman also described how Ramp organizes its engineers into small teams of five or six people, who are responsible for deciding how to complete their projects. “If you look really deep into Ramp's organizational design, it's tons of small teams where we say, ‘Here's the outcome we want you to drive, but it's up to you.’ You can make the call on how you want to spend your time. Why hire someone who can surprise you with their creativity and then tell them, ‘Don't make your own recipe’?”

Glyman says adding more engineers doesn't always get work done faster. Bigger teams often mean more people weighing in on decisions, which can add churn and slow workflow. So leadership sets the goals while small groups own specific projects. For Glyman, hiring people capable of making their own decisions only makes sense if they're allowed to do so once they're on the job.

If you're building a career as a developer or putting together your own team, the message is clear: a real personal project can be powerful proof of ability. But Glyman himself warns that not everyone gets the chance to build something independently, so a portfolio of side projects shouldn't be the only measure of talent.