Slope Over Intercept

A candidate as a line on a graph

Eric Glyman states a hiring heuristic as a line on a graph. A candidate's value over time has an intercept (what they are worth today) and a slope (how fast that value grows). Experienced senior hires sit high on the intercept, which means more known value and therefore a price the market has already paid, but they frequently sit on a shallow slope. A young, spiky person, in his example the 18-year-old freshman intern, starts near zero but on a very steep slope. Glyman says Ramp deliberately hires closer to the steep-slope line: "look for slope over intercept every time."¹

The mechanic Glyman describes

Plot the two lines, he suggests: high-intercept and low-slope (the veteran) against low-intercept and high-slope (the young spike). Over a long enough horizon the steep line wins, and because the market pays up for the known intercept, the steep line is also underpriced. That is why Glyman treats the heuristic as a form of talent arbitrage rather than simple optimism about youth, connecting it to mispriced-talent-pools.

Because slope cannot be measured directly, he says he infers it from evidence of extreme drive: a video game someone built, a competition they won, a hard thing they mastered young. This is the same signal he uses when hiring for spikes.

The heuristic comes with an explicit cost. Glyman states, "the goal is not zero defects, there are roles in which I would fail and probably get fired at Ramp, and that is okay."¹ A steep-slope hire is raw in the present; the bet is on the derivative, not the current value.

Why Glyman frames it this way

The framing reclassifies "hire experienced people" as often buying the priced-in intercept: safe, but low on upside. The edge, in his account, is in trajectory the market has not paid for yet. He treats slope-over-intercept as the temporal companion to hiring for spikes, which is about shape rather than time; together they describe people who are spiky now and steep over the long run. It also underwrites promoting from within, which only works if the intake was steep-slope enough to grow into leadership, and it pairs with person-problem-matching, since some problems still need the intercept in place today. Glyman's habit is to reduce a hiring intuition to an explicit, defensible model.

Tensions Glyman acknowledges

Some roles genuinely need the intercept now: regulated-finance risk, or a system that cannot fail at launch. Glyman presents slope-over-intercept as a default rather than a law, one that trades present reliability for a higher future ceiling. He is also candid that slope is a bet, not a measurement, inferred from proxies (spikes) that carry bias about who gets the chance to build Minecraft servers or train for math olympiads. The trait sought is drive; the proxies used to read it are not neutral.