YouSaid · the spoken record

Pedro Franceschi

lines on the record: 47
first: 2024-07-17
most recent: 2024-07-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Just focus on the outcome, it's going to suck. It's going to take a lot of time and a lot of energy and more energy than you think because you need the energy that comes from the actual process being enjoyable.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do. I mean, I talk about this shit a lot in my team, and I wrote about it. I mean, we did this mental health series call catharsis where we have like founders talking about their own mental health journeys, which is really hard to convince people to do, by the way. Most people don't like talking about it openly. I just talked to founders day in and day out in customers, day in and day out. And that's the same thing everyone's going through. And I think you need to find ways of how do you frame your mind and how do you frame the work you're doing around something that gives you purpose and gives you joy. Because if you are focused on the outcome, if you're just focused on and you don't enjoy the process, the math doesn't add up. Like it just does not make any sense. And I think a lot of the point about like not being apologetic in how you run the company. Honestly, 50% of the value is just doing it in a way that you get energy from the process because if you don't get energy from the process and the process is not rewarding on its own.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's my way around into an idea that works. And sure, that's true to some degree. But once you start something that has a little bit of traction, it's really hard to pivot away into something else. And I think people just don't anticipate how much of just finding a good idea is still really damn important. And Brax was a really good idea. I mean, a lot of the credit is just the idea. Yes, I think we execute it well in some ways. But I think the idea was just that good. And if I were to start something again, I would certainly spend a lot of time getting that part right. And if that isn't a good place, then the other 50% is the 10-year journey of like leveraging those tailwinds, so to speak.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's still a lot more to be disrupted in FinTech than people give credit to it because I think people looked at all the sexy things in FinTech. But if you look at the underlying plumbing of how money moves in the world and you look into like there's a lot of things that haven't been touched yet. And yeah, maybe Rex is there is this investor that been investing Rex, but I actually know quite well that says that Rex is the last good fintech idea. And I'm like, I don't think that's true. I think it's the last sexy good one. But if there's a lot there, but one thing I changed my mind a lot about company building is I think like if I were to write a book about how to build a company, there would be two parts. Part one takes six months. Part two takes 10 years. And they're 50% in 50% importance of each. And the part one is just finding what you're going to do and who you're going to do it with. And I think the initial conditions are like highly underestimated. There's this belief that I can just pick.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the product is pretty outdated, to be quite honest. I mean, it's just literally a card. They have a great point system, but it's just a card. There's no software. There's no controls. There's no nothing, especially as you get larger. But I think the franchise, the brand, and just the way the company was designed over the past 30, 40 years, I love studying business history. And MS is a company. I studied quite a bit. I think it's pretty fascinating.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“American Express, you're pretty good. And they build a very impressive franchise over decades and very hard to be very big and have the degree of customer focus they have. I think you have a lot of issues, but I'm going to be wrong. But I think as you look into the history and how the company endured for that long, the way they've done, I think it's really, really impressive”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I definitely want to go through the journey to realize the potential breaks. I think that's the best path. There's pros and cons for sure, but I'm just excited about how do we take what we go into the next level. And I think that's part of the journey.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it gets different. I think you have more help, right? There's more people helping you do stuff. I think in the beginning you're playing two-dimensional chess as you get a little larger, you're playing through dimensional chess. And probably at some point it starts to be four-dimensional chess. And there's just like a lot more pieces of the puzzle to keep in your head.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't be apologetic in how you went around the company because all the people around you don't have the same visibility and the same context as you have. So if you believe in running the company a certain way, do it.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think when we met the YC guys back in like 2017, they were like, hey, we like you guys, but we hate your idea because we're doing VR before. That was sort of funny. And this invested in us, but thank God. It was sort of funny to like, I don't like what you're doing, but I like you guys.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would probably say in 2021, when we pivoted very aggressively towards the enterprise, because we were serving small businesses and it was like a full, almost a 180, that was pretty hard. And I think the learning was as you prioritize, focus on serving your own customer really well before trying to like serve the whole planet. We had our own customers that were startups that were growing and were becoming bigger. And they had these needs of larger companies because they became larger companies themselves. We didn't have something that could serve them as well as we wanted. And then we just had to make this really aggressive pivot to solve for that. And in some ways, the most customer focused thing we could do was to serve enterprise customers well because our own customers are becoming that and startups that are successful become that. So in some ways it was like this sobering and in hindsight special moment of like learning how to really focus on your customer. And it was really.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A different mentality in the company, in the servicing model, in the way you sell, and the way customers engage, and ultimately find value in the solution beyond the initial use case they have because they know there's a servicing model that will deliver more value for them over time.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think just the reality today is like if you think about our product, right, we don't win on cashback. We don't win on rebates. We don't win on credit limits. We win on customers look at everything we do together collectively. And they say, I'm getting more value from this than these other solutions in the market. I think that's the definition of pricing power, whereas we're offering the same product, more expensive and customers are coming and staying and being happy with it. The other thing is when you go into an enterprise customer, they come to Brexit and they say, hey, like I am paying a lot of our competitors come and say, oh, we don't charge for the software. And our customers come in and say, how are you not charging for the software? Like, you know, I want to pay for the software because I want to level of support. I want a premium solution that someone I can pick up the phone, call someone, someone can come in here and help make me successful. And so I think pricing is kind of an advantage for us and has been for many years where the way we position Brexit is like we want to be the best solution, not the cheapest. And that just creates.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This business is not new, right? Banks have been around for a long time building cards. And card companies, if you even look at the ones that were the banks that were, you know, before 2008, more card heavy, it's not a winner takes all market. And again, I think it's too big and dynamics are too different from a marketplace where there's a benefit of like the incremental unit making the product inherently better.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Companies in the planet that can do that. Number one is Brex. Number two is Citibank. Number three is American Express. That's it. And that's how we patient all these customers. So I think the degree to which financial service has underlies a lot of what we do is like highly underestimated and undervalued, which is why we spend so much time in the early years building our whole financial infrastructure from the ground up, like down to the way we talk to MasterCard, down to the way we move money on ACH, down to the way we do, you know, global money movements, settlements, effects. We built all of that.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Brexit, I don't think Brexit worked for the platform. I think that's a part of Brex. There is this way of looking at this business that says, oh, all that matters is software and financial services are commoditized. I strongly disagree with that view because I think when you're serving small companies, even some mid-market companies, that is true for sure. I think you can say most of the values in the software. But when you go into the really complex enterprise use cases, that's not true at all. You know, we go to like a lot of public companies and the way we pitch in a public company is we show them the software. They get value from it. That's great. What really moves the needle is our global card. Customers come in and they say, hey, I have this problem in 25 countries and I need a card that works locally in all these countries that I can spend in local currency, like if the car was issued by a local bank. I need to settle in local currency. I need to not pay FX fees. I need to not book intercompany transfers across all these different entities. And I need to move the money locally in all these different markets. Brex can do that. And today there's”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you look at the card at face value, like just the actual card, I think cards are not that sticky, right? Because the reality is you can just start swiping another card. You can say, hey, I got more cash back. You know, we talked about some of our competitors that offer the same product for cheaper, right? Essentially higher cashback. And you see the dynamic playing out a lot in the market. We have a channel that we talk about like new competitors and a new competitor comes in and they say, hey, I'm launching a car to hire cashback. And if you think about it like conceptually, right, as like the sort of like economy book view of the world, like the rational thing is, oh, customers are all switching away because they're getting more dollars back. But I think something different plays out in practice, which is a lot of the value they get from the platform and the software and the automation starts to play a bigger role where, you know, customers like, well, actually run my whole closing process on top of this. So the cost is higher than what I gain.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For us, a lot of what we did over the years is how do we become ruthless in looking at the numbers in a way that's like, where is the cash flow coming from at the end?”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, for sure. I mean, one thing about us that we do very differently than most people in our space, I have this belief that we need to look at metrics the most punitive way possible. So a lot of times, like, for example, CAX, I love this topic because a lot of people come like, well, like, what is in your CAC? And we're like, well, it's like sales and marketing cost. And I'm like, well, is like the office overhead in your CAC is the brand span in your CAC is the management overhead in your CAC. And people can like, you know, you can dance around these numbers and say, you know, no, they're not. And, you know, but who cares about that? No one does that, right? And I think one of the things that I learned from Neil and Green Oaks and a lot of our investors, but I think Neil was very adamant on that, is like understanding the economic engine of the business in a very deliberate way from the perspective of like, ultimately, you wanted to be a great business, not like, you know, investors will look at the CAC and the unit economics that way.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, like me and private company is very easy. It's remarkably easy. You hire a banker, you fundraise, and you're done. The question is, how to be a low volatility public company? That's the hard part. The only way that you can do that is having a very high degree of predictability in the business model. And I think for us, that has been the hardest part. So like last year, we were behind plan in two quarters. This year we're way ahead of the plan. You know, we did our best to forecast it. And there's a lot of levers in what happened in terms of customer spending, in terms of where a lot of these things come to mind. But I think we're not yet at a level that we can say, oh, we know for sure where revenue where income is going to be in two or three quarters. And I think it's really hard to go public unless you have that. And that's probably the biggest bottleneck for us into doing is just the level of predictability that we want to have.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We send notes to a lot of customers that came to us saying, hey, no solution to market works for us. No one can solve this problem besides what you all have done. But I need these three or four things. And we said no to them. And if you pretty painful ones.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I agree. I think when you truly change the way people think and you really put one brax and like the collective of the company above their teams and you put a mechanism, which is really important, you put a mechanism that makes that happen every day. I think people in fullness of time, they converge and they start seeing, well, I didn't get funded today, but this next idea or this next big thing will get funded in the next release or the other release after.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gosh, I would say we got a lot of pages from Brian's playbook at Airbnb. The realization here is so there was this feeling that I had probably in like, I had this over the years many times in 2020, 2021, even 2022, I think we felt this to some degree, where we're investing almost $100 million a year in product. And then you go use the product every year. And the experience is like not that much better. It's getting like marginally better, but there's nothing tremendously different. And that feeling bothered me because I was like, what are we doing here? Why isn't this yielding to big things changing that actually makes the experience dramatically better? And one of the things that we did as part of Breast 3.0 is that we said we have a single roadmap now for the whole company. There's no more pro teams don't have their own roadmaps. We have a single roadmap. I choose what the roadmap is. And there's a single editor. And most important.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This story is like obviously we're appealing ultimately to the finance team. And you know, with his campaign, which is like finance gotten the day off. You got a day off because Brax automated a lot of the work that you were doing manually before. Another one that we were learning about during this work is it took seven million hours to build the empire state building. Brack saved 11 million hours. Like what are we going to do with that time? And what our customers go do is they're going to build something great. They're going to use that time to put back into their emissions into serving their customers better. And I think there's something profound about you telling the story, you know, it is relatable. And people are like, wow, like it's not just about the story, right? You have to also deliver it. And I think a lot of what we've done wrong in the past is, you know, we did a very inspirational campaign two or three years ago. The problem was when you use the product, it was very hard to connect that to that broader story. And I think the power comes when the whole thing is one. When you're using the product, you're seeing the way the product gets designed, the way you use the feature.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love that question. I think the thing that I believe about brands is we talk a lot about this idea of like left side of the brain and right side of the brain. And I think, you know, a lot of the times like I was talking to the team and I actually wrote an essay about the sort of team where, you know, we had this campaign and we ran the metrics and we were like, hey, what is the value to breast generates for our customer? And we learned a few things that were really interesting. So we learned that, you know, over 50 billion dollars went through Brex. and that was automatically unbudget and in policy, which is 99.9% of the spend. We also learned 11 million hours were saved by our customers using BREX. So when you look into the data and you understand what would they do before, what they were doing after, well, like, so what? Like what, like, what does that mean, right?”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's an easy pitch. Who doesn't like savings? But I think reality is more complicated than that when you go down on the ground of customers and you ask them and you go to a CFO and you say, no one says no to savings. But when you say, hey, hey, let me just tell you what we think actually matters. Let's talk to like a few customers here. Call them and ask them how they run their business differently based on the kinds of things that you can do. Like when you bring all your global spend in one place and you start to see the difference of having this level of control in the software that allows you to push the dollars to the places that it matters the most and do this globally. And I think the answer has just become different in savings. And don't get me wrong. I think there is a place for that, offering free software and offering a product that helps to save money. I think I can see why that works. And I would be really surprised if we didn't see competitors in a $30 billion market, to be quite honest. But I just see a different reality speaking to customers.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The highest impact and highest ROI versus just thinking about cutting. That's just a very different design decision that would build the whole company around and the whole product around”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it is. And actually, I love the contrast because I just don't think any great company was built on savings. If you go ask like a CFO, if you go talk to like any great CEOs and you say like, hey, what moves Anita in your business? Like what truly made a difference in the finance team? And what they're going to tell you is that what made the difference was this ability of making sure every dollar counted. Like how do you make sure the dollars are going to the right place? And that in these places that really make a difference that you're truly doubling down. You're saying I want to understand what are the levers of growth? What are the levers of cost savings? What are the levers of where to hire? Where are the levers of vendors that make a difference in your business? And it's less about cutting. It's more about shifting. That insight for us has been really remarkable because when you see the sort of the degree to which you build a product around this idea of how to make sure the dollars are going to the place where they have”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He probably took us longer than he should have to focus on the financing team, which is like once you start scaling, you hire a finance leader. And the finance leader comes in and they have their own priorities. And probably, I wish you were doing more for them in 2019 and 2020. In 2021, we basically said we're going to do that really well. So we're going to go to the most complex use case, which is like how do we serve a 10,000 person company and their finance team and scale that down, which was an interesting pivot, I would say, from where we were. I just wish we had done more of that earlier.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Forced learning that we had to do over the years that I think the degree to which is true and the degree to which it needs to continue being true as the company grows is something that, you know, you always think, oh, I have 100 people. I'm going to have a thousand people to make 10x more. And it's like, no, you're going to do maybe 30% more because now you have a lot more scale and you have problems with scale and you have a lot more. You can't just like build something and ship it. You have to like, you know, measure, roll it out over time. You have to have like AB testing and all.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How much headcount is not the bottleneck for just doing more things. And I think a lot of the themes and mistakes that we've made over the years were around that, I would say, like just like believing that we could do more and we could actually do. So I think focus was like a”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think maybe starting the second part, I think there was this point in 2019, 2020, where we thought we could do it all. We're going to be great at serving small businesses. We're going to be great at serving enterprise customers, great at serving startups and all these different customers are going to come to Brex and be like totally happy. We try to build it all. We had a small business offering. We had a startup offering. We had a mid-market offering, an enterprise offering. And I think the learning is the limiting factor in how many things it can do is not the headcap. not the team is the leadership bandwidth. It's like how much time your best people spend building things that are really high quality and really high craft. That's just really hard to scale. It's not just a matter of adding more folks. It's like their attention being divided and you don't trust that many people around a completely new business or new thing off the ground. And I think that just took us, we just completely underestimated.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think what you're deep in the weeds in a problem, you're in this state, which I call like high stress, low anxiety. You're working on a problem. It's really complicated. You don't know quite know the solution, but there's no anxiety because you know that this is the thing that matters, right? The flip side is when you don't really know what it is, you're in a state where it's like it's relatively low stress because you're not deep in any problem like 24 hours a day, but you're like higher anxiety because you don't know what the highest leverage point is. I think you have to learn how to be in both ends of the spectrum.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Faster. And I think there is this thing where a lot of anxiety building, a company comes from what truly matters? Like, what is the one thing that if I spend time on and not hedging, not like spreading across like four or five different priorities, what is the one thing that really, really move will move the needle? And I think when you identify this thing and you just put a lot of time there, there's this almost Zen state, very liberating where you can just focus entirely on one thing.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just said, hey, I'm going to spend 70% of my time building that product. And I just like delegated everything else of like day-to-day management of the company to my team. And I just spend like 60, 70% of my time writing APIs of the engineers on like how would the enterprise product work, how would the platform that we're building would work. And it took us a year to get something that worked. And that's how ultimately we closed customers like DoorDash, like Coinbase, like Robinhood, like all these large enterprise customers that would not have traditionally come to Brex. But because we were so obsessed over making the bottleneck faster and making the bottleneck not be a bottleneck anymore. And I think the reason this is meaningful is because as you do that, you can allocate and marshal this proportionate amount of resources into the bottleneck. So I can say, well, I know that the highest leverage use of my time as the founder and the CEO is to spend time making that one thing go.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, for example, you can ask yourself, well, like, hey, what is my bottleneck right now? My bottleneck could be, well, I don't have, for example, Brexit in 2021. Our bottleneck was we didn't have an enterprise product. We were limited in the kinds of customers we could serve because the reality is as customers matured and got to a certain scale, Brex, the product that we had back then, didn't scale for them anymore. So when you look into the numbers and you look into where the growth of the business would come from and you look at like how we retain customers throughout their whole lifetime, that was like a really big pain point. As time passed, you're like, what is that one thing that can change the trajectory of the business? And the one thing is building an enterprise product. Because if you don't have the enterprise product, there's nothing you can do. You can have the best sales team. You can have the best marketing. You can have the best everything. But if the product is not truly great, you can't unlock the next growth phases of the company. So what I did back then is I.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So I think it's like very simple. I think it all starts by asking, hey, what's limiting your rate of growth right now? And people say, oh, there's many things. There's not. By definition, there's only, there's one thing. In any system that limits the rate of progress for the whole system, it's called the bottleneck. People should read Toyota production systems. It's like best book on all of this, like lean manufacturing. I love these things. And once you find a bottleneck, the highest leverage thing you can do is increase the throwput of the bottleneck. more than anything else in the system you could change. If you could change only one thing is changing the rate of progress in the bottleneck.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there is this belief. Oh, the job of the CEO is like you hire a team and then you manage that team and the team does everything. The job of the CEO is to make the company successful. There's very few things that matter. But I've seen the best CEOs that I was fortunate to spend a lot of time with is they just have this unbelievably high degree of understanding of what matters. Like there's very few things that make a business work. And there's a lot of things that can be average. There's a lot of things that you can suck at. But if you're really good at these very few things, amazing things happen. And I think there's just this degree of like, how do you understand like what are the bottlenecks in the business, right? And what are these like structural points of leverage that if you make those very few things better, the whole outcome becomes just bigger, larger with less friction faster.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I heard a sing from Brian Chesky once that really stuck with me, which is like, you know, for many years, I think founders become like apologetic in the way they went around the company because the company starts scaling, right? You have something that's working and then the business starts growing and then you have like all these people from the outside that have seen”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think for us was two things. One is we made a pretty big change early this year called Bryce 3.0 where we basically changed the operating rhythm of the company in a pretty material way. One of the big principles is like we're just going to simplify how we run the company at every layer. And the first thing was like, if we're clarifying how roles and how people operate at every level, we should do this at our level too. And the second thing is, you know, as a company matures more as we start thinking about, you know, an IPO, public markets, it's an easier transition if you have like a traditional C structure that every company has, which is a chairman and CEO structure. So, you know, we looked at both and we're like, you know, we're not going to go public anytime the next year. It's something coming in the future, but getting ready for this and having the structure in place sooner acclimates everyone to the way we actually run the company day to day. And so it felt like a very natural point to make the transition.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like fundraising was one of the offenders, but there's definitely hiring a lot of people was also not a one. And perhaps some of those are enabled by the fundraising. But I think it's more the mindset of like, what is the core? And then like, what is a thing that you're actually, you know, scaling and the mentality has to be this very scrappy and very early, especially as you get bigger, because it's like harder.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In hindsight, as we look back, I think as time passed, Brex had this like interesting journey of like we thought we were a big company. And then he started behaving like a big company and you do like a lot of things that big companies do. Probably the biggest learning over the past six or seven years is the sort of way of scaling a company is you have to become a larger business, but keep the mentality of a small company, right? So how do you keep a lot of the leaders closer to the ground? How do you keep a lot of the ears closer to the customer and understand exactly what's happening? How to understand how they make decisions and why they choose to go with Braggs over others? There's something about like scale that like scale naturally pulls you away from thinking like a small company, right? Because you have all these layers, these people, these management systems and all of that in place. A lot of the work, especially for the past like 18 months, was like, how do we just unlearn a lot of that and go back to the basics? And I think.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not at all break sick a lot Brexit a lot of different permutations of different things falling in place in a very specific way to exist a lot of funding was one of them”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“300k. So we had to make the company work with 300k. And the interesting thing is you just build this wiring in your brain around how do I create value on everything you do, right? Because you can't afford to ship a feature if it's not going to drive more value to the customer and you can capture percentage of that value back to you. So I think you're wiring in your brain changes in this sense of like, you know, at the end of the day, yeah, everyone can have MAUs. Everyone can have all these metrics and numbers and growth and fuzzy numbers, but where is the money? Where's the revenue? And you can only get revenue if you generate value for someone. So I think it wires your brain around value in a really interesting way.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so. I think there's something about, and it's funny because I think there's been two experiences for me that were similar to what you're describing. First one is I build this thing online. And the first thing I actually made like real money, I guess, was I was selling this app on the city of Store. City of Store was the jailbreak, the unofficial app store for the iOS back in the day. And I made like 200K in like when I was 14. And my mom was looking at that and she was like, oh, what is this money? What are you doing online? And then I explained to her, I think she got it. But it wasn't her tax return because I couldn't like file tax returns on my own when you're 14. You can only file them, I think, when you're 16 and above in Brazil. I guess the other one that was interesting for us is we build our first company in Brazil to probably the first four or five years of the company. We went from zero to processing a few billion dollars a year in JFV and all the money we raised.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decisions that your parents make early on that they sound small, but they completely change the course of your life. Over the years, you know, I started working when I was 12 and I told that to my mom and she was like, you're not going to work. There's no way you're going to have to go do that. And then she came interviewing you with me into this company back in 2008. You know, I think overall she's just been very supportive of the journey since the beginning.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it's funny because I grew up in Brazil, born and raised there. I started coding as a kid when I was eight or nine, originally hackney iPhones back in the day where they were not sold in Brazil. And as you can imagine, I spent a lot of time at the computer. And I remember there was this article that came out probably in like, I don't know, 2007, 2008 or something saying that like Bill Gates' daughter could only spend 45 minutes a day in the computer. And then my mom read that and she was like, well, you're spending like 12 hours in front of the computer every day. And there was this point in time where she was like, well, I can either ignore what you're doing and say, you know what, this is not healthy. Fuck it. Like you're not going to spend that much time or I can understand what's happening. And I think she was wise to see that I was actually trying to build something productive and build something, right? And learning how to code took a lot of time. So she let me do that. And, you know, I think there was these like.”
2024-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source