The Ledger
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Henrique Dubugras says Silicon Valley's taboo against cash compensation is hypocritical
“I think there's this thing in Silicon Valley where compensation is kind of like this weird topic that people don't talk about because you need to be like mission driven. And if you're compensation driven, you're bad, right? You're evil because that's like bank…”
Henrique Dubugras argues being mission-driven is not required to build massive companies
“I believe that being mission driven is not the only way to build a massive company.”
Dubugras: Expense software must prioritize execution speed over saving money
“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 …”
Dubugras: Expand product lines only when core offerings reach maturity
“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…”
Dubugras neglected customer conversations for 1.5 years during Brex's growth phase
“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.”
Brex paid market or above-market cash compensation to attract early hires
“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…”
Brex will be the world's top corporate credit card by 2024
“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.”
Evan Spiegel told Dubugras that authenticity is the most important CEO trait
“I got around being a CEO was from Evan Spiegel from Snap. He told me that the most important thing about being a CEO is being authentic to yourself.”
Dubugras stopped ADHD medication because it degraded his spontaneity and relationship-building
“Even though it was giving me some superpowers, I was becoming more focused and productive in some ways, it was taking away from other superpowers that I had. For example, spontaneity and building relationships and other things that I was good at... And I stopp…”
Henrique Dubugras evaluates candidates on 'career delta' over total years of experience
“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…”
Brex's longest venture fundraising round took only six days to close
“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…”
Brex raised its Series C without touching any Series B funds
“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.”
Startups should cut office luxuries but never skimp on top employee compensation
“So for example, I think like you shouldn't save on employee comp. If there's good people and you want to hire them, like, and you have to raise everyone else's salary just to hire this person because, you know, they're more comp and you need to be fair to ever…”
Henrique Dubugras believes the CEO role adapts to the individual's existing strengths
“One of the things I truly found out is that, like, being a CEO is a job that adapts to you, and not that you adapt to the job.”
Dubugras: Startups with $5M in funding couldn't get corporate cards in 2017
“Startups had to raise a lot of money and couldn't get a corporate credit card. And that was the first problem that we saw was like, how come you have raised five million dollars and you can't get a card to pay for your SAS and AWS bills?”
Dubugras: His biggest CEO mistake was pattern-matching against mismatched leaders
“I think the biggest mistake that I've made is trying to pattern match with people that are too different for me.”
Dubugras read 17 books in six months after starting ADHD medication
“And then I started medicating for ADHD, so I started taking Adderall, and then six months in, I read 17 books in six months”
Brex split co-founder roles into internal management and external CEO duties
“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…”
Dubugras: Brex hired big-company executives who couldn't adapt to strategic shifts
“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.”
Dubugras: Evaluate executive adaptability via zero-to-one track records, not interview questions
“Yeah, there's a bunch of questions, but I think smart executives, they know the answers to all of them. I think it's looking through the experiences, even if they're at a big company, how to take something off the ground. Or would they always hand it something…”
Dubugras: Brex repeatedly made decisions contradicting its venture capital investors' advice
“And we went so many times against what our investors thought we should do.”
Dubugras: Companies slow down by creating processes to prevent 1% edge cases
“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…”
Dubugras: High operational process is justified for existential risks like cybersecurity
“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.”
Dubugras: Ramp was Brex's first insurgent competitor after legacy financial incumbents
“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.”
Dubugras: Selling new products to new customer segments equals starting over
“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.”
Dubugras: Direct customer conversations are the sole source of strategic conviction
“And I think it's only by talking to customers that you build real conviction.”
Dubugras: Core platform bets should be sequenced, not run in parallel
“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…”
Dubugras: Mercado Libre's board never discusses share prices or public markets
“And I haven't heard in the mailing board, one discussion about the markets, one discussion about investors and the share price. It's all Product and strategy. Product and strategy. Product and strategy.”
Dubugras: Money is best used as fuel for personal and business growth
“And I think the best use of money is growth, both for the company and personally. I have no issue spending money to go to a trip to meet someone that I'm going to learn a ton from, right? Like, I have no issue hiring someone to teach me something that I'm very…”
Dubugras: Smart people post-hoc rationalize decisions driven by intuition
“A lot of times, very smart people, this is the thing about smart people, they rationalize anything, but the reality is, like, intuition comes first, rationality comes second, so you want to do something first, because of whatever, like, you're feeling like it,…”
Dubugras: Intuitive decisions have historically outperformed purely analytical ones
“Historically, all of the heart decisions have been better than the head decisions, so I would say more heart these days.”
Brex lacks good internal communication because Henrique Dubugras is a weak writer
“So because I'm not a good writer, I think, you know, Brex lacks good internal communication.”
Dubugras: Brex employs 1,100 people, including 600 in product and engineering
“We're at scale, you know, we're like 1100 people like EPD org is 600 people.”
Dubugras: Hiring a personal chef was his best personal health investment
“Having a chef, changed my life completely. I eat so healthy, and before COVID, I was, like, serving up, driving off. Delivery is, like, cold, and it's hard, and I think that now, I think my health increased a lot because of it, so I think it's the best investm…”
Brex co-founders knew each other for only weeks before starting their company
“You know, it's kind of lucky. I think a lot of the, you know, common advice is that, you know, don't work with someone that you haven't known. For a long time, and we knew each other for, you know, a couple of weeks before we started a company together, so I w…”