The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 95 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Lemkin: Full-stack AE model does not work for most SaaS companies
“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…”
Lemkin: Agentic API quality will drive vendor switches over human sales outreach
“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…”
Brex tracked customer spending on Amex by snooping linked bank accounts
“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.”
Blond: Brex framed Divvy's advanced budgeting features as unnecessary complexity
“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…”
Lemkin: Brex and Ramp have 20-30% margins while Payhawk has 70%
“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%.”
Blond: Sales Revenue Targets Should Be Set With 90% Confidence
“I set the target with 90% confidence that we're able to hit it.”
Blond: Location-based pay inherently means getting paid less for identical output
“It's universally applicable that you're getting paid less for producing the same, depending on where you're located.”
Blond: Brex biases hiring away from Tier 1 cities for cost savings
“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.”
Dubugras: Relying on Bank Partners Slows Fintechs Down; Build Tech In-House
“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.”
Rippling's generalist reps lost early deals against Brex and Ramp
“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…”
Blond: Brex Saw Triple the Conversion Rate From In-Person Sales Meetings
“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 …”
Lemkin: Brex Laid Off 20% at $250M–$300M in Revenue
“And that's why even great companies like Brex just announced they had to lay off 20% at 253 hundred million in revenue.”
Blond: In-person sales visits tripled customer conversion rates at Brex
“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…”
Kelly: Shifting SDR quotas to closed revenue tripled Brex's SDR-sourced revenue
“We more than three X what the SDR org was sourcing previously when they were on an S two quota.”
Sam Blond: Brex SDR ACV tripled after tying quota to revenue
“The average the ACV of an SDR generated customer went three X about 30 days after we made the change.”
Blond: In-person sales visits tripled early Brex conversion rates
“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…”
Brex achieved a 75% demo-to-close rate on its champagne outbound campaign
“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.”
Blond: Brex's champagne outbound campaign saw a 75% reply rate
“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 …”
Blond: Brex saw a 3x deal size jump from automated lead scoring
“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.”
Blond: Sub-70% margin companies should report gross profit internally over ARR
“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…”
Blond: Brex shifted sales quotas to gross margin dollars
“At Brex, we changed the quotas from sort of like a revenue-based quota to a like gross margin dollars-based quota.”
Blond: Achievable targets drive faster growth than aggressive stretch goals
“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…”
Blond: Brex pegs sales compensation to local cost of living
“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,…”
Blond: Referral hiring lowers risk through mentorship but hurts diversity
“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.”
Blond: Brex scales accelerators by percentage, paying higher nominal dollars in SF
“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…”
Dubugras: San Francisco Billboards Boosted Brex's Outbound Email Response Rates
“We had actually a higher response rate on outbound emails because we did this billboard campaign.”
Blond: Switching Brex sales incentives to revenue drove massive per-rep growth
“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 …”
Dean: Fintechs like Brex, Mercury, and Chime use multiple partner banks
“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…”
Blonde: Brex AE-sourced outbound generated exponentially higher ACVs than SDR-sourced pipeline
“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.”
The entire spend management category has fewer than 100,000 business customers
“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.”
Lemkin: Half of EchoSign's 20 sales reps became tech CROs
“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”
Blond: Customer onboarding should be milestone-based rather than time-based
“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…”
Blond: Early Brex SDRs Were Barred From Scheduling Demos Below Director Level
“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…”
Blond: 80% of Brex's revenue came from outbound sales
“About 80% of Brex's revenue came from sales outbound.”
Sam Blond: Brex paired SF billboards with champagne to drive outbound
“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…”
Brex's SF billboards significantly boosted outbound email reply rates
“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 …”
Blond: Brex boosted revenue by tying SDR compensation to revenue generated
“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”
A highly effective sales team can mask a lack of product-market fit
“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.”
Fox: Empathy was the top predictor of success for Brex CS hires
“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…”
Fox: Incomplete onboarding setup was the top churn driver at Brex
“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…”
Fox: Brex split customer success and upsell roles at 30-40 employees
“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…”
Fox: Half of Brex's net new revenue came from existing customers
“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.”
Fox: Brex customers using competitor products were most likely to churn
“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…”
Fox: Engineers avoid customer calls unless scheduling and outreach are centralized
“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…”
Lemkin: Multi-billion valuations for Brex, Ramp, Expensify, Divvy changed VC investing behavior
“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.”
Blond: Guaranteed draws during onboarding can make or break sales hiring
“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…”
Blond: Brex and Divvy were fierce corporate card competitors from 2018–2020
“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, …”