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
Blond: Brex sales reps each drove several million dollars in revenue
“Fortunately for Rex in Rex's case, the sales reps were driving several million dollars of top line revenue.”
Pigment signed Figma, dbt, Carta, Brex, and Gong within six months
“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.”
Blond: Early-Stage Startups Should Set Targets on a Monthly Cadence
“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.”
Blond: Startups Should Set First Targets When Dedicated Sales Reps Are Hired
“When you really need to set your first target is when you have dedicated salespeople who are focused on revenue.”
Bedecarre: Raise client Brex creates cafe-style perk spaces instead of mandatory hubs
“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.”
Blond: Brex ties 25% of top rep's comp to team performance
“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…”
Blond: Brex decided to remain permanently remote post-COVID
“We made the decision very early on that we are going to go fully remote even after COVID ends.”
Blond: Brex has not lost SDR productivity after going remote
“We've actually found that to be true. We haven't lost productivity with this group of employees.”
Dubugras: Corporate Card PMF Is Execution, Not Demand Discovery
“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.”
Dubugras: Brex Used Outside Recruiters for Its First 10 Hires
“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.”
Dubugras: Brex Paid $300,000 for Three Months of San Francisco Billboards
“We paid, like, 300,000 dollars for three months of, like, a lot of billboards.”
Dubugras: Partnering With Banks Functions Like an Equity Pitch
“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'…”
Dubugras: Brex Hired a General Counsel as Its Third Employee
“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”
Dubugras: Brex Manages Credit, Underwriting, and Tech Entirely In-House
“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…”
Dubugras: Brex Hired a CFO as Its First Employee
“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 …”
Dubugras: Brex Raised Its Series A With No Code or Pitch Deck
“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…”
Blonde: Brex predicted long-term renewals and revenue from 30-day card spend
“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.”
Lemkin: EchoSign revenue alumni became CROs of Brex, Rippling, and Gong
“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.”
Blond: Using a Presumptive Close Tripled Conversion Rates at Brex
“But the presumptive close, I think probably increased conversion rates by something like two to three X.”
Blond: Brex Tied LTV and Churn Directly to First 30 Days
“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.”
Brex scaled from $2M to over $300M ARR during Kelly's tenure
“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.”
Sam Blond: In-person customer visits tripled Brex deal conversion rates
“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…”
Blond: Early Brex close rates were significantly higher in SF than NYC
“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…”
Brex's first dedicated expansion rep outperformed new customer acquisition reps
“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 …”
Brex sponsored event hotel room keys designed to look like credit cards
“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.”
Brex's first outbound campaign gifted 300 champagne bottles to funded founders
“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…”
Blond: Brex acquired most of its Y Combinator batch before launch
“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.”
Blond: Brex CEO Enrique Dubugras filled calendar with customer calls developing Empower
“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 …”
Fox: Half of Brex seed customers advanced rounds every 12 months
“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,…”
Fox: Rapid User Acquisition Masks Underlying Churn in High-Growth Startups
“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…”
Fox: Brex Created Dedicated Implementation Team to Mitigate Churn
“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.”
Blonde: First 30–60 Days Dictated Customer Retention and LTV at Brex
“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…”
Blond: Brex Generated About 50% of Closed Revenue via AE Outbound
“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.”
Sam Blond: B2B companies underutilize internal staff who match buyer personas
“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 …”
Blond: Y Combinator is the largest shareholder of Brex
“YC was the largest, it was and is the largest shareholder of Brex”
Blond: Brex's Wi-Fi password was 'Buy Amex 2024' reflecting real ambitions
“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.”
Blond: Targeting startups as an initial niche drove Brex's market share
“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…”
Snow: Divvy parked branded cars outside Brex's office to troll them
“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.”
Pigment built its Google Sheets connector based on feedback from Deliveroo
“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.”
Brex hit consecutive monthly targets from June 2018 to November 2019
“We started these monthly revenue targets in June of 2018. The first target that we missed was November of 2019.”
Blond: Brex revenue accelerated during COVID due to tech spend
“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…”
Stripe, Mixpanel, and Brex acquired early customers through the YC network
“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…”
Dubugras: Brex Spent Six Months Building Infrastructure for Five-Minute Card Onboarding
“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.”
Blond: Early Brex Had Every Employee Sign Congratulatory Notes to Customers
“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…”
Blond: Brex scaled revenue from zero to $400 million
“The 10 hacks that helped Brex scale from zero to four hundred million in revenue.”
Blond: Brex shifted from monthly to quarterly and then annual 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…”
Justin Betakure: Coinbase, Shopify, and Brex use remote-first models with hubs
“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…”