Brex

“It wasn't a question of, You know, finding if people need what we're building. It was a question of, can we build what we say we will build, and if we can, we know that a lot of people will want.”

“We just spent a lot of money in recruiting fees for these outside recruiters that helped us get, you know, the first 10 people, but after that referral started going and started making it better.”

“We paid, like, 300,000 dollars for three months of, like, a lot of billboards.”

“Getting good investors of good credibility, like, you know, makes the banks perceive that you have a higher chance of success. So, because in a way they're also investing in you and somehow, right? So it's a little bit like an equity pitch, you know, when you'…”

“Like, this really instant onboarding that we have took, you know, Probably six months developing all the, you know, the backend infrastructure, KYC, AML, and all the regulatory requirements to be able to issue a card in like five minutes.”

“We had actually a higher response rate on outbound emails because we did this billboard campaign.”

“So we wanted, like, actually our GC hire was our third hire in the company. And it was fundamental for us to get our banking deals and regulatory stuff done because, you know, there was someone that actually knew what they were doing”

“If you rely on a banking partner to do something, you will be slowed down more than you think you will. So, you know try to own everything yourself, otherwise our product will be, you know, slowed down by the bank.”

“We do the credit, we do underwriting, we do the technology, we do basically everything. We have a banking partner but, you know, we basically do everything. And getting that was like, and being able to control the entire stack was something that we learned fro…”

“And you know, our CFO was actually our first hire because we thought, hey, this is actually a financial business. We have to raise debt. We have to underwrite. We have to do all these things. So, hiring a CFO as, like, our first employee was actually critical …”

“The first raise was with Ribbit and Mickey. I think a lot of that was, you know, Mickey, we knew for, you know, two, three years. He had seen us in a previous company. It was a lot of a bet on us. Like, hey, in the market is like, hey, you know, these guys see…”

“One of the superpowers that not many people understand about YC is because we have so many companies who've done YC, In effect, you get warm leads to anyone who's ever done YC. So it's a lot easier for YC companies to sell to one another. That's not a surprise…”

“Our revenue did the opposite of what we were a little bit concerned about, which was Accelerate, because the spaces that we're selling into are tech and e-commerce and these companies that spend a lot on things like software and servers and ads and things that…”

“We work with our people team and they have different cities and they peg them based off of a It's all cost of living related. And so you mentioned if there is an AE in San Francisco with a 250,000 dollar comp band, what we do is if we're hiring them in Denver,…”

“So we just added in addition to managers and in addition to these buddies, we now have a team lead or a coach that is the top performing individual contributor on our team. 25% of his number is now tied to the performance of the team. And because of that, it's…”

“The person that makes the referral really takes that person under their wing and makes sure that they're successful. We get the reflection on them and like all of these positive, I think or not, I think I'm pretty certain that it doesn't help diversity.”

“We made the decision very early on that we are going to go fully remote even after COVID ends.”

“It's universally applicable that you're getting paid less for producing the same, depending on where you're located.”

“We've actually found that to be true. We haven't lost productivity with this group of employees.”

“When people overperform, an extra 10% is 10% on each of those. So if somebody gets an accelerator at the 250,000, they may make two 75, and in Denver they make two two 20. So it's 10% of what your salary is and not necessarily the hard dollar value. So the per…”

“We have a bias towards new hires that actually aren't in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles. What we categorize as tier one cities because there's cost savings associated with hiring people in lower cost locations.”

“One of our clients Brex that are creating these amazing cafe spaces that are like you know perks rather than like, you know hubs that you have to go into.”

“Remote first is what Coinbase and Shopify and Brex are doing, where they run the entire company remotely from asynchronization to all hands done remotely, but they have hubs where you can, almost like a cafe, where you can go in and visit colleagues or even do…”

“Initially, you want to set targets on a monthly cadence. There's no advantage early on to setting, ah, targets that are farther out into the future. You want to set monthly revenue targets.”

“Brex launched in June of 2018. We had monthly targets for June, July, August, September, October, November, December. The year of 2019, we switched to quarterly targets. And so we said at the beginning of 2019, where do we want to be in the month of March? Whe…”

“Your business will actually grow much faster with the winning culture and it's counterintuitive. If you set a target that is higher you may think that that's going to drive more behavior and ultimately drive higher performance from your team. But if you're mis…”

“I set the target with 90% confidence that we're able to hit it.”

“We started these monthly revenue targets in June of 2018. The first target that we missed was November of 2019.”

“When you really need to set your first target is when you have dedicated salespeople who are focused on revenue.”

“We built a connector to Gsheet thanks to the team at Deliveroo. We are building a sort of spreadsheet mode within Pigment thanks to some feedback that we got, and we accelerated that, that that roadmap to feedback we got from Brex and Figma.”

“Some are actually iconic SaaS brands, so you probably know the Figma, the DBT of this world. Some are very famous brands for CFOs, Carta, Brex. Some are iconic brands for sales team. I can talk about Gong, for instance.”

“Brex is amazing in the US. Ramp is amazing, but those are like, 30%, 20% gross margin products. These guys, and probably others, are 70%.”

“What Rex did, and what I'm recommending to founders, again, depending on the business, let's just say businesses that are less than 70% gross margins, instead of at the all hands and having the headline number be, we're at ten million, a hundred million, whate…”

“At Brex, we changed the quotas from sort of like a revenue-based quota to a like gross margin dollars-based quota.”

“Fortunately for Rex in Rex's case, the sales reps were driving several million dollars of top line revenue.”

“Brex launched as the first corporate card for startups. And what that did was it sort of branded us as The right fit. If you're a startup, this is where you come. If folks are familiar with innovators dilemma or innovator solution, we picked like a small segme…”

“Brex, where I was most recently CRO, and Divi, where Sterling is currently CRO, were bitter competitors from the time that I joined at least, which was mid 2018, at least through sort of like early 20 20, we were the primary two players in the corporate card, …”

“We had a lot of sort of low margin deals where we were hyper competitive because we negotiated on price so deeply something that I'm a bit conflicted about, but those, there were a lot of deals where the margins weren't great.”

“Divi had a sophisticated budgeting tool. There was a feature that Rex did not have. And we actually positioned that as a negative. We said, you're a, you know, 50 person company. You don't want to have a lot of sophistication around rules around where cards ca…”

“We paid some cars, wrapped them in like, you know, the Divi branding and said, you know, corporate card for everybody. And we had them sit outside your office.”

“You can really de-risk that through either you know, you're hiring your first two sales reps, put them on a draw for 60 to 90 days, and a draw means pay them their full commission. If you're paying somebody like 150,000 dollars a year, that means that their co…”

“YC was the largest, it was and is the largest shareholder of Brex”

“Brex's Wi-Fi password was by Amex, 20, 24, and they, like, actually had a plan. Like, they had thought about how they were going to buy American Express in 2024.”

“When Brex and Ramp and Expensify and Divi, all of them are worth billions, it changed. Not only did it change the size of outcomes, but it changed the way we invested. We didn't have to decide who was number one.”

“Brex, we set the expectation from a very early stage that you are Going to outbound and about 50% of our closed revenue was outbound AE.”

“It's almost universally true where the product that you are selling at your business, you have the buyer of that product internally... And so companies probably under leverage that internal resource around you know, what the buyer, if they are selling to this …”

“We saw that, you know, about half of the seed companies that we acquired as customers would grow into Series A companies, and a half of those Series A companies would graduate into Series B, and a half of those Series B into Series C, and this would happen at,…”

“The one that most correlated to a successful customer success rep or account manager was empathy. So we w we had an interview that the sole purpose of that interview was to measure the degree and the level of empathy that that person had. And we only hired peo…”

“The challenge with some of these high growth companies like Brex is that user acquisition, net new user acquisition, Sort of obfuscates the problems of customers churning, because you're still growing revenue a lot month over month. And so despite having churn…”

“One of the things that we realized was that one of the biggest reasons why customers would churn was because they weren't properly set up on Brex, right? So, you know, they would sign up to Brex, and they would start using the Brex card, and they would deposit…”

“Eventually we split out the team when we cross kind of like 30, 40 people. And we had one team of customer success reps that only focused on churn... And whenever an opportunity came to sell a new product or to increase our share of wallet with an existing pro…”

“Implementation was a separate team, but it was born as a result of this insight that implementation was the most effective low hanging fruit path to mitigate churn.”

“When we had that team up and running half of the net new revenue that we would bring to Brex came from net new sales, but the other half came from the existing base.”

“What we found was the first 30 to 60 days was the most critical time period in a customer's sort of existence on the platform. And if certain actions were performed, the lifetime value of the customer, the sort of stickiness of the customer was exponentially g…”

“The customers that were most likely to churn were those customers that were still using other competitor products, right? So they were using other credit cards. They were using other bank accounts. And we realized that when we would speak to these customers, t…”

“I've noticed this pattern when speaking to a lot of founders that a lot of engineering and product leaders, they're expected to speak to customers, but they're also expected to do the work of reaching out and finding out the customer and sort of scheduling the…”

“If you put in successful sales, one downside or potential downside of that is it can mask product market fit related issues that you can be acquiring customers because the salespeople are really good at doing just that.”

“I think the like biggest data point that we could point to was something like a three X increase in the average opportunity size, because people were going after the opportunities that generated the most, most revenue for the business in a very automated way.”

“At Brex when we shifted the comp plan for SDR from like opportunities created to revenue generated, and the output of that was a lot more revenue”

“There was a period of time at Brex where our founders spent less time customer facing and then very quickly realized that that was a mistake. And I've talked a couple of times on this podcast about Enrique having just his calendar full of customer calls as we …”

“The champagne campaign where we sent bottles of Vuv Cliqueau along with handwritten notes from Enrique, and we automated that handwritten note process. Just saying congratulations on your recent fundraise. We're a fellow early stage startup located in the Bay …”

“The 10 hacks that helped Brex scale from zero to four hundred million in revenue.”

“We restricted the outbound to the YC batch that they were in into prior YC batches also. And we acquired most of their YC batch and dozens of companies from prior YC batches also.”

“He talked about how even Brex, which is, which was still relatively SMB for a long period, how the AE's had to do half of their own deals through outbound, and so he really described, in a way, a full stack AE, right, and people talk about that, and I think th…”

“What we did was we took one sales rep, and this was when we were something like eight Folks on the sales team. And we moved him or her to being dedicated to expansion in the base. And he looked at, you know, these reports exactly as I just described, where is …”

“And then like, 75% demo to close rate. Now like Brex is like free in a way. We made money on interchange, and so 75% conversion rate is extremely high. We weren't asking for a check.”

“We could sort of cheat at Brex in that we could see the payments that were flowing to other cards. We linked to folks' bank accounts and we could see how much they were paying us and we could see how much they were paying American Express.”

“We sponsored the hotel key cards so that anytime anybody checked into the hotel that was associated with Sastr, their room key was a Brex credit card.”

“That was really effective, and it was also really helpful with our outbound, because when we sent an outbound email to somebody whose headquarters was in downtown San Francisco, the probability of them replying was significantly greater, because they had seen …”

“The first outbound campaign that we did at Brex was we bought 300 bottles of Veuve Clicquot champagne. So those were like 40 bucks each. Good enough champagne that people are going to break, excuse me, good enough champagne that people are going to drink it. N…”

“One thing that we did in the early days of Brex was we measured conversion rates based off of whether a potential client received an onsite visit or not. And those that a sales rep went on site and met the customer, they closed it like a three X rate. You know…”

“And by really targeting a specific geo where you talked about this flywheel of customers that can start to engage with other customers the likelihood that we were gonna close a deal when we created an opportunity in San Francisco compared to even New York, whi…”

“The average the ACV of an SDR generated customer went three X about 30 days after we made the change.”

“When we measured conversion rates at Brex by whether or not we visited the customer in person. And I think we had like 15 to 20% conversion rates. There was sort of the norm where we didn't visit a customer. And when we visited a customer, they three X. So the…”

“The outbound one Brex sort of famously did a champagne campaign where we were sending bottles of champagne as part of outbound crazy high reply rates with that. When most folks were going paid online advertising, Brex did paid offline advertising. We had a geo…”

“We more than three X what the SDR org was sourcing previously when they were on an S two quota.”

“About 80% of Brex's revenue came from sales outbound.”

“Where she was able to scale the business from about two million in ARR is where Ashley joined and left it like three hundred million plus in ARR.”

“When we actually measured At Brex, when we did a customer onsite, and the conversion rates of customers that received an onsite versus customers that we tried to close inside, and it was three x. The customers that we met in person had three x the conversion r…”

“And that's why even great companies like Brex just announced they had to lay off 20% at 253 hundred million in revenue.”

“When we started at Brex, We were a financial tool for smaller companies. We would go after founders because they didn't have finance people just yet. And for more mid-market companies, we could be purchased by folks in finance or accounting. And we generally s…”

“But the presumptive close, I think probably increased conversion rates by something like two to three X.”

“Customer happiness, like NPS, lifetime value, the likelihood of churn. We were able to tie all of these things back to the experience that they had in the first 30 days that they were a customer.”

“One thing that we measured while I was at Brex was conversion rates. When people were selling remote virtually, they didn't meet the customer and conversion rates when people met the customer in person. And when we met a prospective customer in person, we had …”

“Onboarding at Brex and what I would recommend for other folks, onboarding isn't dictated by a period of time. It's not like a 30 day process. Onboarding is a milestone based process. And until a customer is fully onboarded, they're living with that implementat…”

“And then once we had a core rep trying to sell as the 15th SKU and compete with a new logo rep at Brexer Ramp, like we were just getting our butts kicked. Like it wasn't, we were just like, this doesn't, like we couldn't iterate fast enough. We couldn't keep u…”

“We only had 20 something sellers and 10 of them went on to be top CROs, right? CROs at Brex, CRO at Ripley now, Gong, also CRO at Gong. Seismic, a long list of others, half of them went on to be leading”

“If you think about it, there is a lot of excitement around the category, but the category is still less than, I don't know, 75,000, a 100,000 businesses that are using the product.”

“Whenever one of our customers would fundraise and announce a new fundraiser, Brex had a really high market share of tech backed startups. We would, at our all hands meeting, we would pass around a note that every person in the company would sign. And we were l…”

“Our revenue team went on to be the CROs of Brex, Rippling, Gong, So many leaders, like others, like 10 of them, and like that we had this monster team and I missed, I didn't, what I didn't know was how good I had it in some areas.”

“The AE sourced opportunities converted at a significantly higher rate to customers, and they generated far more revenue. So the ACV of AE sourced outbound opportunities was significantly, almost exponentially higher than the SDR sourced opportunities.”

“We could actually predict things like expansion renewals for Brex. It was card spend. So how much revenue a customer would generate? By their, the actions that they took very early on as a customer. And for us, it was like the first 30 days.”

“Every single one of our big clients has multiple banks. And if you use your examples, Brex has at least two. These technically I think might have three, but at least two. Mercury's at three. They still have stuff at Evolve, if I remember right. And Chime, ther…”

“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 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 …”