The Ledger
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Levy: Tech is entering a golden age of M&A
“So look, I said this a few months ago, I think we're entering the golden age, a golden age of M and A right now. I think there's a bunch of factors that are melding together to make it a point in time where the consolidators are getting bigger. They're taking …”
Mark Zuckerberg is the greatest M&A CEO in public market tech history
“Mark Zuckerberg is the best. I'll go on record to say the best public market CEO at M&A in tech ever.”
VCs will block life-changing startup acquisitions that miss fund return thresholds
“I think the truth is that even with your board as a founder, I'm not sure your incentives are completely aligned because it's back to, well, first of all, what is the price on the table, right? Is it a nice two or three X for the VCs on the board or not? Becau…”
Financial rails let Brex monetize 20x better than software like Expensify
“We believe that we monetize 20 times better Then other spend management systems, systems like Expensify or Concur, because we monetize through financial services.”
Brex will surpass Concur's $1.5B revenue mark through interchange monetization
“If Brex continues on our current run rate, like we're going to eclipse that much, much faster by winning their customers, but monetizing through the interchange, not through generic software revenue.”
Brex is the only next-gen card company owning its financial infrastructure
“The way that we differentiate against our competitors is the fact that we're the only next gen Category-defining company that owns our own financial infrastructure. Vertically integrated, so to speak. And what that means is getting super technical is that we d…”
Majority of Brex revenue comes from interchange fees despite multiple products
“And so when you think about Brex and what we're doing, the majority of our revenue is through interchange, even though we have a number of other product lines.”
Amex acquired spend startup Center for $600M at under $20M revenue
“Amex bought a company called Center that had less than twenty million of revenue for six hundred million.”
Multi-billion dollar tech acquisitions are mere call options for tech giants
“And so in all those cases, these companies are spending one to three percent of their market cap on the MNAs, which is not like, that's not transformative MNA. It's really like, again, these big consolidators are just taking call options bets on these fast gro…”
AI benefits will accrue mostly to fast-moving larger companies
“I think that in a world of AI and as AI starts to mature, I think a lot of the benefits actually go to what I would call not the incumbents, but like the fast moving larger companies. Like, of course there will be a few companies that start from zero and explo…”
Capital One's Discover acquisition creates the largest US credit card issuer
“The first one that comes to mind is Capital One and Discover. Huge deal. This is not a tuck in. This like materially changes their whole business model. And the reason is because it creates the largest credit card issuer by loan volume, because it allows Capit…”
Stripe's Bridge acquisition is a major bet on stablecoin payments
“The next one that Is obviously really interesting is the Stripe bridge deal. So, you know, that was announced a few months ago and bridge was started by a Brex alum, Zach Abrams. We love him. And that's super interesting, obviously, because it shows Stripe tak…”
Founders have a fiduciary duty to talk to corporate development
“Paul Graham has an essay called never talk to corp dev that he published, I think like 15 years ago which
I, my hot take is I actually don't agree with it.
And essentially his point is that look, as soon as you talk to a large big tech, or you talk to a pote…”
Founders should be harsh and direct when negotiating with corporate development
“In M and A, it's the opposite. I think you don't want to be nice. You want to be not rude, but you want to be direct and you want to be harsh.”
Mature Brex cohorts spend 60% more than they did on Amex
“For mature cohorts, Customers are spending 60% more on their Brex cards than they were on Amex in the last month that they were on Amex.”
Most successful tech M&A occurs between existing commercial partners
“Most successful MNA, I would bet, you know, I have to run the numbers on this, but most successful MNA comes in tech where the companies have been partners first, because like, why wouldn't you take a call option on a relationship?”
Startup sellers have the least leverage between LOI and closing
“In terms of when you actually started the M&A process, I think that's when as a seller, you're actually at the most weak negotiating points to be very careful. So that's when you got something in writing and you're bought in, but nothing's closed. That's when …”
Founders selling to private equity should always use an investment banker
“So once you're selling to PE, I would say absolutely use a banker, 10 out of 10 times, because that's like a tried and true method of like a data room and a management presentation and like a whole dog and pony show.”
Sequoia's Shaun Maguire helped structure Stripe's acquisition of Bridge
“I mean, like one of the most interesting parts about the Stripe bridge deal was that it seemed that the, one of the investors from Sequoia on both boards was like pretty instrumental in helping to get that deal done, which you don't see very often. And it's a …”
Founders exploring M&A should keep talks completely secret from their team
“The number one advice I give founders on when they're testing the waters on M and A is to not tell anyone at their company. Because as soon as you get folks excited, it's a little bit like raising around, but at an extreme, as soon as people at the company, ev…”
Successful business partnerships require companies of similar size and alignment
“You need to partner with folks that are similar to you in order for it to be successful. It can't be one really large company and one really small one or one that serves companies in one space and one in the other, because then again, it's like, what's in it f…”
Zip and Navan could become Brex's equivalent of Shopify
“Zip and Navon, I think are both examples of potential Shopify's because they're both growing extremely quickly. We're growing extremely quickly. Everyone grows together.”
Business development and partnerships should operate like a venture capital portfolio
“BD and product partnerships should be the VC arm of a company. And this is what I tell my team is like, look, we need to look for pole vault opportunities, but we're going to fail sometimes like, yeah, Navon zip are going great, but there's a bunch of other pa…”
B2B stablecoin adoption will take much longer than consumer adoption
“Of course, stable coins will become a mainstay for B to B companies, but I believe it will take a lot longer.”
Only 22% of spend on Brex is travel and entertainment
“When you look at the spend on Brex, actually only 22% of it is what we call T and E spend.”
DoorDash spends many multiples more on Brex than it did on Amex
“DoorDash, one of our beachhead customers, they've been on Brex for now three years. They're spending many multiples more on Brex than they were on their American Express.”
Brex has multiple business lines each generating over $100M in revenue
“We now are a multi-product company in the sense of we have more than two business lines at over a hundred million in revenue.”
Brex's enterprise business is growing over 100% with 130% net revenue retention
“So I'm very proud that our enterprise business is growing over a hundred percent and our NRR in the segment is over a 130%.”
The Federal Reserve will cut interest rates twice in 2025
“Obviously Trump is pretty loud on X and on Trump social around like pushing rate cuts, but I don't think Powell's gonna give into that. So my gut says two.”
Waymo will be operating in six cities by the end of 2025
“I think that I love the product, but also it seems like the speed at which they're iterating is increasing. So I'm going to go with six.”
Google X spinoff Iyo is suing Jony Ive and OpenAI
“There was a lawsuit against a company called IO that or sorry, the company called IO that spun out of Google X is suing John Ives and OpenAI, and that was a headphone company, like an earbud company.”
Brex has raised about $1.5 billion in total primary funding
“So we've raised about 1.5 billion in total.”
Levy: Brex partnered with First Republic in 2018 against SVB
“We just signed a partnership with First Republic Bank. And I said, okay, interesting, but aren't you guys like a, Year old startup. And he's like, yeah, they want to compete more with Silicon Valley bank, who has an all in one suite of banking and corporate ca…”
Sixty percent of Brex customers are non-digitally native businesses
“So one stat that we're super proud of is now, 60% of our companies are outside of what we call like digitally native companies, which I think is a big accomplishment given how, how old we are.”
Carta data shows early-stage tech acquisitions are up 200% year-over-year
“Essentially there's 200 plus companies in tech that are like seed all the way to series B that have been acquired year to date, which is up 200% year over year.”
Levy: Billion-dollar-plus tech M&A is up 68% year-to-date
“Billion-dollar-plus tech M&A is up 68% year-to-date.”
Paylocity acquired Airbase for $300M with approximately $15M in revenue
“Paylocity bought a company called Airbase for three hundred million, and they had about, I think it was like fifteen million of revenue.”
Brex is actively developing its own stablecoin strategy
“And obviously Brex as a card issuer and spend management platform, we need to take note of that. And we need to be thinking about our own stable coin strategy as we monitor what folks are doing.”
Brex and Navan had 2,000 mutual customers before launching their partnership
“Navon, literally the president over there, Michael, he's become a good friend of mine, came to us a year and a half ago, and we had like 2000 mutual customers”
Stripe and Shopify were each valued at $1B when they partnered
“Stripe did a partnership with Shopify and they were both actually valued at a billion dollars when that partnership started in around 2013, 20, 14 ish.”