Brex

“And at Brex, we started with things like activations. So like number of logo customers that we signed up, you know, there are a lot of like SDR incentives that were around like meetings, that sort of thing. The moment that we switched reps and then eventually …”

“What he ended up doing was, like, Building an entire open source layer, which he actually has open source called Crab Trap. That is like an agent that watches all the network traffic and all the things that Open Claw does.”

“He has his agent look at the meeting transcripts from, like, All of his direct reports, and he, like, can see that, like, two levels down. And then the thing that really jumped out at me is, like, he can use meetings that he's not in. To figure out, like, what…”

“For instance, one of my close early former clients and one of the design studio company called Brex, they started off as a VR company and then went into financial services.”

“At Brex, it was from the beginning. One of our first hires was our CFO.”

“Brex has gone deeper on AI than almost any enterprise company we know.”

“We build this thing called Crab Trap, which we open sourced probably about two months ago, which is actually the way we use to secure agents at Braxton production.”

“We have like a recruiting agent at Brax called Jim. We have a policy for Jim. And you know, all the traffic goes to that same policy and 98% requests go through automatically, two percent use an LLM.”

“I always tell people, like, I think if you don't, if you can't minimize your surface area and solve the problem with a very clear set of boundaries, you haven't found the right problem to solve.”

“I think one of the most, one of the hardest things of building a company is talking to customers and not, not just having the conversation, but how to extract the sort of unspoken signal from these conversations.”

“We did a lot of exploration with like synthetic customers and building customer world models and things like that. And those are really valuable once you know a lot about the customer, but when you don't know enough yet, I think there's this like very basic th…”

“One of the things that We do at Brax now is building this customer world model is a similar idea where we're trying to get every single touch point that the customer has of us. Like literally like what, how many times they click a button to the dashboard all t…”

“On Brex, we ended up building our internal version of this. We call it Magbuy, where the idea is you can effectively, you know, every dollar of token spend in the company, you can attribute to a product we have to customers, an internal tool that we use to ser…”

“When you look into the sort of ten-mile radius we're in now and maybe you include New York tons of token consumption and you could probably argue, and we see in the data also faster revenue growth.”

“When you have KYC for free, you can KYC a lead versus the customer. So you start to have risk orientation up in your funnel and that changes who you even target.”

“And I think that the biggest discontinuities in a positive way that we've had were when we said, hey, let's keep this old way here, keep putting it in a corner. And like, how would we design it if we started the company today from scratch? And then just doing …”

“You should separate the agent that, and the systems that are actually emitting code from the system that is talking to customers and the system that is reasoning about the conversations with customers and translating into product roadmap. Basically three separ…”

“Our client sales team. Now runs on our customer role model.”

“Whenever someone has a conversation with the agent that is the flags an issue or a bug or something that feels like the conversation didn't go as smoothly, that creates a bug. That bug triggers an agent that's going to go and modify the code base and the promp…”

“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.”

“The Brex outcome was a great outcome. Like the reality is that was a great outcome. That was a win. They sold a company for five billion dollars in like eight or 10 years. They crushed it. You know, it's not their fault that they raised a twelve billion dollar…”

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

“It might be the API that gets us to switch, not the humans, not the chocolates, not the gift certificate, but if the API is better, works better with our agents, we might spend a couple hours. It takes to move over our key accounts to ramp because it's the age…”

“And so I get called to book my meeting rooms. Like I don't book meeting rooms. Claude archives, sort of my email first pass at clearing out my inbox. I don't do any of my reimbursements and Expenses. Claude will go to Benapas and like file the reimbursements. …”

“He actually bought a bank for, I think, sixty million dollars of his own money, and then he started this and he basically uses it as a the underlying bank under Mercury, under Ramp, under Brex, under all these companies, and so he and I think they're doing, th…”

“The whole thing from first sort of serious meeting to sign definitive agreement was a little bit over 40 days.”

“You look at where the company is today, you know, the company is growing, you know, 40 to 50%. You know, borderline cashflow positive.”

“And Adyen trades at just below 14 times gross profit. This deal is at 13.4. So, so when you just compare to where all the multiples exist in the range of outcomes of being a public company, this is the very, very top of the range.”

“And then you look on this on day one after closing, Brexit will be the third largest corporate card in the country.”

“The public filings from Capital One, you know, there's nine hundred and fifty million dollars of integration costs and retention and all that.”

“And Brex today serves one in three startups in the US.”

“We went from, you know, zero to 300 public companies on Brex and, you know, all the major AI labs are on Brex today.”

“So we had very few people. We had probably 15, 20 people in total at the end. And, but the majority of it was just a leadership team.”

“The company was never for sale, right? So they approached us and said, we want to take a look right now.”

“Braxton Ram combined probably have three percent of the U S markets.”

“When someone fundraises a private company, you're selling one, two percent of the company, right? When you're selling, when you're doing a transaction like this one, you're selling 100% of the company. So there's a very big difference between putting in a hund…”

“We're accelerating our AI roadmap by two to three years compared to what we would do as a standalone company.”

“You have existing incumbents in the finance space, like the ERP companies, for example, I don't think they're going to go do that.”

“Before we were issuing RSUs to twelve billion in 21, and then in 23 we actually said, let's reprice the equity at four. And we did something that's pretty unusual. We switched from RCUs into options and the strike price was low on those options.”

“Reaccelerating growth is really hard. Most companies can't do it. It's just really hard to reignite the thing that made you great. Because you're much bigger, there's much more scale, there's scar tissue everywhere.”

“Here's a crystallized outcome, which is the biggest deal of this size that ever happened in history, and the scale of a bank and a fintech company.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“Capital One strikes a 5.15 billion deal for fintech.”

“It also oversees nearly thirteen billion in deposits held at partner banks and money market funds.”

“We actually launched sort of like a new recruiting and employee value proposition for Brex a couple months ago called Quitters Welcome, where we actually intentionally are leaning into this idea that we have a disproportionate number of folks who go on to beco…”

“You can come into this business And build like financial AI applications and instantly have that deployed to roughly 40,000 customers across you know, the fortune 100 down to, you know, tens of thousands of startups.”

“And AI is one of those areas where we have another team of Just roughly about 10 people who are focused primarily on LLM applications, and we wanted to create a bit of a separation there because the way that we were thinking about this, and this is actually so…”

“It's actually fairly, fairly uniform across the entire engineering department. It's actually kind of funny, like one of our largest cursor users is actually an engineering manager.”

“I think part of it is like sometimes the too much experience or too much knowledge of how to solve a problem and actually be an impediment to thinking differently about it and thinking about it from like an AI first lens.”

“The folks who say we're kind of a card product, they drive 60% of our direct revenue.”

“We've we set up a completely automated Pipeline for evaluating customer applications to get them onboarded instantly to Brex, which is something that used to require human intervention either for underwriting or KYC. But now we basically have a series of agent…”

“About half of the applications that we're building right now on the agent layer are running on Mastra and then the other half are actually still running on like yet another internally developed framework. Which is a framework that's focused more on networks of…”

“Like the best UI UX for Brex is just the card. Like every single thing that you have to do in the software beyond just swiping the card is like an opportunity for AI to eliminate some work for you.”

“We kind of just hit the eject button and built our own framework, which is one in which we have agents that are able to basically DM with other agents and have multi-term conversations amongst themselves to coordinate to complete a task to or like to complete …”

“We have like three pillars to our AI strategy. We have our corporate AI strategy, which is how are we going to adopt and like buy AI tooling across the business and basically every single function to be able to 10 X our workflows. And we have our operational …”