Brex

“I hope Brex in five years is the number one corporate credit card in the world in all industries and all sizes. And I'm still the CEO.”

“We were very non-restrictive in cash compensation. We didn't force people to take pay cuts to join us. So I think that's like a reality. A lot of startups is in the beginning. It's hard to get really good people or more experienced people because, you know, yo…”

“When we raised our Series C, we haven't, hadn't touched our Series B yet, and I think by the time we probably raised our Series D, we probably wouldn't have touched our Series C.”

“And then whenever, you know, we're all around the round that took us the most time to raise took six days because we already knew, you know, Everyone involved, and everyone already knew Brex, and you know, the decision was kind of made even before we went fund…”

“So because I'm not a good writer, I think, you know, Brex lacks good internal communication.”

“The way I think about it today is I think there's a few things, but I think the thing I most look at is career delta. So where did they, you know, start and where are they based on like, how much time are they working? You know, things like that. So if you kno…”

“The incredible founders of newer companies like Brex, which is one of our fastest to a billion dollars.”

“On the VC side, Matt has worked with the likes of Peter Fenton at Benchmark, Several Sequoia partners, Hemond at GC, and Mamoon at Kleiner, to name a few. As for founders, Matt's worked with the founders of Brex, Coinbase, Plaid, Reddit, Flexport, and many mor…”

“If someone hacks Brex, it's the end of Brex, right? It is worth adding a lot of process to make sure that no one hacks Brex, because the one percent of the time it happens, it's the end of the world.”

“Historically, all of the heart decisions have been better than the head decisions, so I would say more heart these days.”

“Ramp was always, like, something super interesting for us because it was the first competitor that was, like, an insurgent. Someone who was coming and growing that wasn't like the big guy, JPMorgan and American Express.”

“And we went so many times against what our investors thought we should do.”

“And then that's when we said, actually, no, what they're doing doesn't make any sense for a lot of our customers, maybe for their customers, the direction that makes sense in the product and expense. It's helping companies move faster. That's what matters for …”

“For a good year and a half, I just had so many things going on with fundraising and hiring and pride and all these things that you just forget to talk to customers.”

“If your bets need, like, core platform investment, right, like, you need the entire company to mobilize to make it happen, then I would say, like, hey, sequence it, like, choose one. It's not that you're never going to do this bet again, just, like, you need t…”

“And I think we hired a bunch of people for a while that were just very good at scaling, getting something that's working and making it bigger. And we had so much change of recs and strategy and direction. A lot of people couldn't keep up with the change.”

“Pedro and I, we kind of found our space. Split around external CEO and internal CEO. Pidra actually loves management, and he hates doing a lot of the external stuff that CEOs do, and I don't really like management, but I like a lot of the other jobs the CEO ha…”

“99% of the people that weren't buying bottles of wine now have to do this process that slows them down in order to solve for the one percent of times that things go wrong, right? Get to this story that I just told and extrapolate to basically everything in the…”

“If you're trying to go with a new product to a new set of customers that you don't serve today, which honestly is what we did, that's really hard. That's like starting a company from scratch.”

“We're at scale, you know, we're like 1100 people like EPD org is 600 people.”

“If you're expanding to, it's the same customer that you're serving with a product that makes your current product better because that product exists. So you're gaining, not only you're selling this new product, but your old product is better because you have t…”

“I think the biggest mistake that I've made is trying to pattern match with people that are too different for me.”

“Have money in an account that's not correlated to Brex and Mercury in two other places, and have the rails set up between those pools of capital, those deposit accounts, so that you can immediately move from one to the other very quickly. It's the discipline o…”

“When we're looking at a sales call, it's very difficult to look at it in Totality. We break it up into bite-sized steps and then be able to critique whether or not we are doing the things to get access to unique information that we can be able to determine whe…”

“I don't introduce anything in the middle of a quarter. I'll only introduce something at the beginning of a quarter. There are certain things that are too disruptive to introduce in a quarterly basis, so we'll take those half year or full year.”

“One of the departments that we built actually catalogs those things, and then when they build up to a specific level of residue, we figure out when is the right time to be able to augment the playbook and then be able to re-enable the teams and introduce that …”

“If you don't understand how to change the buying criteria to lead to your product rather than leading with your product, then I think that's the biggest challenge, at least that I have in building and training a sales force is to refrain from being excited to …”

“When you can balance some experience with the right type of person, with someone who has segment experience, but no, not industry experience, that's when you get your best, most innovative and sort of interesting sales campaigns and structure and distribution …”

“If I do my job correctly and you lean in on the playbook, And you follow the rules that have been set up. Technically, you should be able to get more done in a day to be able to make more frequent trips to the bank to make bigger deposits because that's why yo…”

“So in, in my family, we have a saying, it's not the score. It's not the box score that the thing that you focus on. It's all the little things that the box score doesn't have, because if you do those little things, the box score takes care of itself. Every sin…”

“There's only three reasons why An organization will make a purchase. They're in trouble right now, they see trouble coming, or an individual or group wants to be made a hero and get ahead of something.”

“Add-ons expansions, purchase of other products or categories of products are a byproduct of doing all of this other stuff really, really well.”

“The second a customer thinks that you are trying to do something that's benefiting you personally or breaks versus actually serving the customer, then all trust is lost.”

“Asking that individual the last time they, for instance, implemented something similar to Brex, and then just listen. And if they don't have a precise or concise answer, or can't point back to something that they did, then you probably are not talking to the b…”

“Maybe five, seven years ago, you used to touch an individual four times or five times, but, or they would convert into wanting to learn more about your business. Now we're up to like, 16 or 20 times to be able to do that.”

“I think that those are the best times to create demand. When you are focused on being able to drive value in regards to investments a company makes in giving employees money to spend on their behalf, the tighter the times are, the more they need to pay attenti…”

“When quotas go up and territories shrink, Have, that's the definition of growth. Then the only way for you to be able to make more money is to go faster.”

“Brax, for instance, has been able to deliver on that over and over again, So I don't feel as though I need to overly discount in order to be able to add value to an organization or create that compelling event.”

“You have to be okay with constructive tension in a sales campaign, and if you don't have constructive tension in a sales campaign, then you're probably not introducing something that's pushing the boundaries of the thinking of the group you're talking to.”

“Ramp is absolutely going to be the winner. Probably will be two, three, four, five, 10 times more valuable.”

“The reality is the importance of picking the right company it just really defines one's career. I attribute so much of my success to joining the right businesses. Now, like, I was able to perform within those businesses, and, you know, for context, we're talki…”

“We decided at a very early stage, we were less than a hundred employees, we decided that we were going to open a restaurant and lounge. And so we opened a in South park in San Francisco, we opened a Brex lounge on top of a South park cafe, which was a restaura…”

“At Brex, we started with personal networks, we moved to investor networks, we moved to YC companies, we moved to former YC companies, we then put billboards up all over San Francisco, and we targeted companies that were headquartered in downtown San Francisco …”

“In hindsight, that was a big mistake. We should have focused on what was working, building a credit card company using our dollars to acquire things like customers, and not, you know, remodeling A hundred year old restaurant that was in dire need of a remodel.…”

“At Brex, we did not use recruiters, internal or external, to source candidates for the sales organization Ever.”

“We measured conversion rates at Brex. When we met a customer in person, we had three X the likelihood of closing that deal than if we didn't.”

“We show up, we had task rabbits outside of the event in Brex t-shirts handing out Brexfist burritos to every single person that walked in the venue. So the first experience that they have at Sastra is they get a Brex burrito on when they walk in. Four bucks a …”

“The very day that we launched in GA the product, we put billboards up all over San Francisco. And I think the campaign cost something like 300,000 dollars over three months, but we were everywhere. And that just made everything easier for us.”

“And I've talked about a champagne campaign that I did at Brex where we sent founders a bottle of champagne early on and, you know, congratulated them on a recent fundraise. That's differentiated. It received a ton of responses.”

“When we were a relatively mature startup so let's call it 50 to a hundred million dollars of annualized revenue. One of the things that we noticed was that the AEs were sourcing far more of their own revenue than their SDR counterparts.”

“When it worked at Brex, we were able to three X the referring revenue that SDR has brought in within six months.”

“The other thing at Brex is once, once we started copying them on revenue, the S two is absolutely tanked.”

“The banks that were, you know, before 2008 more card heavy, it's not a winner takes all market. And again, I think it's too big and dynamics are too different from a marketplace where there's a benefit of like the incremental unit making the product inherently…”

“In 2020 10 and 21 even 22 i think we fell this to some degree where you know we're investing almost a hundred million dollars a year in product”

“I just don't think any great company was built on savings.”

“So like last year we were behind plan in two quarters, this year we're way ahead of the plan.”

“And I think, you know, a lot of the work, especially over the past, like, 18 months was like, how do we just unlearn a lot of that and go back to the basics?”

“If I were to write a book about how to build a company, there would be two parts. 50% importance of each. Part one takes six months. Part two takes 10 years. And the part one is just finding what you're gonna do and who you're gonna do it with.”

“Overall, it's probably demand generation in the mid-market. If I had to guess. And actually, no, not guessing. This is the bottleneck right now.”

“And then I think there was this moment last year that, that we just said, Hey, like I, there's just a way in which I believe we should run the company. And it's not very traditional. And I think a lot of people will probably, you know, it doesn't follow all th…”

“We made, I call you three tender offers since we started a company, and like, nothing changed.”

“So what I did back then is I just said, hey, I'm going to spend 70% of my time building that product. And I just, like, delegated everything else of, like, day-to-day management of the company to my team. And I just spend, like, you know, 60, 70% of my time wr…”

“I think, you know, I can see why that works, and I would be really surprised if we didn't see competitors in a thirty billion dollar market, to be quite honest.”

“They've built a very impressive franchise over Decades, and they're hard to be very big and have the degree of customer focus they have.”

“I think the product is, is pretty outdated to be quite honest. And I mean, it's just literally a card. They have a great point system, but it's just a card. There's no software. There's no controls. There's no nothing”

“We spent so much time in the early years building our whole financial infrastructure from the ground up, like down to the way we talk to MasterCard, down to the way we move money on ACH, down to the way we do, you know, global money movements, settlements, eff…”

“I would probably say in 2021, when we pivoted very aggressively towards the enterprise, because we were serving small businesses, and it was like a full, almost a one 80.”

“And we said no to a lot of customers that came to us saying, hey, No solution in the market works for us. No one can solve this problem besides what you all have done, but I needed three or four things, and we said no to them and a few pretty painful ones.”

“And I think we, in 2021, we basically said, we're going to do that really well. So we're going to go to the most complex use case, which is like, how do we serve a 10,000 person company and their finance team and scale that down.”

“There is this investor that, you know, didn't invest in Brex, but I actually know quite well that says that Brex is the last good fintech idea. And I'm like, I don't think that's true. I think it's the last sexy good one, but I think there's a lot there”

“I spoke about other founders of this, which is like, I think when you're deep in the weeds in a problem, you're in this state, which I call like high stress, low anxiety, which is like, you know, you're working on a problem. It's really complicated. You don't …”

“Oh, we know for sure where revenue, where, you know, where income is going to be in two or three quarters. And I think it's really hard to go public unless you have that. And that's probably the biggest bottleneck for us into doing is just level of predictabil…”

“We did a very, very inspirational campaign two or three years ago. The problem was when you use the product, it was very hard to connect that to that broader story.”

“Brax was a really good idea. I mean, a lot of the credit is just the idea. Like we, yes, I think we executed well in some ways, but I think the idea was just that good.”

“I think the initial conditions are, like, highly underestimated. There's this belief that I can just pivot my way around into an idea that works. It's really hard to pivot away into something else, and I think people just don't anticipate how much of just find…”

“And today there's three companies on the planet that can do that. Number one is Brex. Number two is Citibank. Number three is American Express. That's it.”

“We have a single roadmap now for the whole company. There's no more broad teams don't have their own roadmaps. We have a single roadmap. I choose what the roadmap is and there's a single editor. And most importantly we do very few things in that roadmap. And t…”

“For sure.”

“We're not going to go public anytime in the next year. It's something coming in the future, but getting ready for this and having the structure in place sooner probably just acclimates everyone to the way we actually run the company day to day.”

“And it took us, you know, a year to get something that worked. And that's how, you know, ultimately, we closed customers like DoorDash, like Coinbase, like Robinhood, you know, like all these large enterprise customers that would not have traditionally come to…”

“Over fifty billion dollars went through Brex, and that was automatically on budget and in policy, which is 99% of the spend.”

“I definitely want to go through the journey. And I think to realize the potential of Brex I think that's the best path.”

“Brex went from like zero to a hundred million dollars in revenue in like in 18 months after launch, and Mercor went from like a million dollars in revenue when I invested to like over a hundred million, like in 11 months.”

“Frankly, I don't think I would have invested in Mercor if I hadn't invested in Brex.”

“Brex was the very first, I think.”

“I think that's really smart for product development, but I think what Ramp has done with their counter positioning against Brex is just genius marketing.”

“Brex is like 10, 11. And Mercury's at three and a half, with 500 in revenue”

“Once the growth rate slows, they will be valued. Just like if they're growing the same as Amex, they will be valued the same as Amex. The growth is what's saving them.”

“They have the margin profile and core dynamics of a financial services company, but they have the growth rate of a software company.”

“Ramp is at a billion in revenue. Brax is at 700. They're both around the breakeven to moving profitable phase.”

“I think that's really smart for product development, but I think what Ramp has done with their counter positioning against Brex is just genius marketing.”

“Going back to the first thing, I think it was a great outcome, and I think, you know, you build something from nothing to a five billion dollar outcome before you're 30. Heroic result. Absolutely be praised.”

“From an operational perspective, this is further validation that quote unquote, I've won. I started later and I'm doing a billion. They started earlier, they're doing seven hundred million.”

“Brex's acquisition by Capital One, 5.15 1,000,000,050 percent cash, 50% shares.”

“We're gonna forget about Brex in 24 months. We're gonna even forget whether it was two X's or how to spell it.”

“Capital One bought Discover Card. Discover Card has a closed network where they get all the money in the interchange. Right? So that's a really powerful asset for them now with, you know, now that they have Brex, they will probably be directing as much of that…”

“Whichever of those doesn't have an API forward product. We'll lose market share, which everyone does. We'll gain market share.”

“Certainly we're going to rebuild our financial stack after Sastra annual and we will move from Brex to ramp if it is the most agent friendly and automating procurement is a huge bonus.”

“Fortyx runway revenues when the comp traded at six in terms of breaks, even albeit on a lower growth rate is a pretty healthy valuation.”