My grandpa passed away today at 94. I had created a small foundation in his name to pay for his grandkids/great grandkids education and announced it to the family during Christmas. He was flooded with happiness. Lesson: honor you loved ones in life. Tchau Vô Tonho! Vai com deus.
Excited to announce that I'm joining the board of
@Mercadolibre
! Excited to work with Marcos and the team to further our mission to democratize commerce and financial access in LatAm
I'm so happy that SVB customers will have full access to their funds tomorrow. With this excellent news, our emergency payroll loan offer is no longer required. This is a far better outcome for those customers. Thanks to all the Brex employees and capital partners for their
Founders, pro tip: when you ask your VCs to post wrong data trying to cause FUD on your competitors, make sure they have their info right otherwise your company looks bad!
@zebulgar
you need to compare card spend to card spend, and all money movement (all payment types) to all money movement, you can't just compare Brex card to Ramp all money movement
apples to apples it looks more like this
Since I reduced how much sugar I eat by 95%, I started to notice how in your face it is all the time everywhere. It's impossible to walk 5 minutes through an airport without seeing chocolates or candy bars. The world is addicted to sugar and we definitely capitalize on it.
We launched Brex Cash. A bank account replacement w/ an industry-leading yield; the only one that rather than charge you, rewards you; integrated w/ Card for full visibility on how money flows thru your business.
I wish
@SlackHQ
built a full internal comms system (messaging, internal wiki/boards, email). It sucks to have 3 separate systems for this. We’ll never migrate to teams bc we dont use the microsoft stack but if google built messaging we probably would. Cc
@stewart
Hot take: building plans on how to be a $100b company leads to bad plans. CEOs focus too much on how to get there instead of what customers need. Focusing exclusively on the customer is the only way to truly build a $100b company. Maybe it takes longer, but its the only way there
I'm sorry for the Quibi team. They tried to build something to make people's lives more fun and it didn't work. It sucks for everyone. A few things I think we can learn from this experience:
Greenoaks is one of the best investment firms over the last 10 years by a good margin. Im glad their story is being written. Neil and Benny are truly fantastic!
We are
#2
on
@CNBC
's Disruptor 50 List! 🎉
🏆 This is a huge honor for us and shows our team's commitment to bringing corporate cards, expense management, reimbursements, travel, and bill pay — all on one global platform.
See here:
$MELI crushed another quarter. Ebay+Paypal tried to buy the company a few times over the years and today $MELI is worth more than $PYPL building a massive business in LatAm. So proud to be on this board!
We announced
@brexhq
will be remote-first forever. Here is the e-mail Pedro and I wrote to the company explaining our decision-making process and how it’ll work.
I came from Brazil to Silicon Valley because I thought it was the only place I could truly create a large and impactful global company. That is not true anymore. Value can be created from anywhere if you can still hire leaders that learned the playbooks of successful SV companies
One sign of a great leader is the ability to attract, hire, and retain talent even better than they are themselves. The hardest part is helping leaders recruit talent that is more senior than them.
One of the best advices we got before starting Brex was that second-time founders usually remember the last year of their startup and try to replicate that, not the first year. And every successful startup needs to go through the painful first year.
It's kind of crazy to believe that FTX had no internal software to control client funds and reconcile it automatically. We built our first fintech company when we were 16 and we built a version of this. It's hard but not *that* hard.
For those who know me, my weird/fun fact is that I don't eat vegetables. Like, at all. As a new year resolution I decided to start eating vegetables. I had broccoli today, it wasn't that bad! Any other recommendations on easy to like vegetables? :)
🚨 Huge Empower News!
We are working with
@OpenAI
to bring advanced AI-powered tools for CFOs and their teams.
The new features will provide relevant insights on corporate spend and answer critical business questions all in real-time.
Learn more:
You know investing is so hard... even the best hedge funds have a hard time maintaining returns for a long time. Yet twitter is full of valuation specialists 🤔
It’s important to benchmark yourself against the *best* in the world in that category, not your nearest competitor! We aim to have NPS similar to Apple and Tesla, not similar to the best in financial services. Same thing for any metric.
Second, it’s easy to help people believe in themselves much more. Just demonstrate a lot of belief in them early in their career (or in school). It only costs some time, but it has to be genuine. It creates a lot of value in the world, and it compounds so the earlier the better.
Inspired me to do the same! For
@brexhq
Q1 2019 was 0% outside of the Bay Area, Q4 2021 was 73% outside of the Bay Area. Silicon Valley is in the cloud indeed.
Inspired me to look up the same numbers.
For Coinbase, Q1 2019 was 30% outside the Bay Area, and last quarter (Q4 2021) was 89% outside the Bay Area.
Tech is definitely decentralizing. Silicon Valley is now in the cloud.
SVB gave us our first warehouse line that allowed Brex to be where we are today. We're happy to be supportive with $200m of our own corporate cash. We feel safe because it's fully FDIC insured!
And last but not least - lets not criticize this team for trying to build something special. Building a company is really hard - and sometimes it fails. But that's part of the innovation process that creates progress. So thank you Quibi team for trying :)
I ran my first company’s sales team until 10 people. Was the best learning experience possible. Teaches you a lot about what actually generates value and makes you a better product leader. I recommend reading the Sales Bible as a first book.
I told myself I wouldn't join any other boards, but couldn't say no to
@Expedia
and their management team. Super excited to join
@dkhos
,
@sama
, and other amazing board members!
Brex has your back, and starting tomorrow, we're raising the amount of FDIC coverage you can get to an industry-leading $6M.
We're committed to helping you protect your funds to the fullest while maintaining 100% access at all times.
Learn more 👇
Complex systems are rarely built from scratch. Usually they start as simple systems that evolve. Really hard to create a large organization by predicting everything from day 1. It needs to be small and adapt by itself, no matter how much experience you have.
This is something Pedro and I learned the hard way in our last company. We took too long to go through our first audit and it was very painful. At Brex, together with our CFO Michael Tannenbaum, we got a E&Y audit from our first year of existence. Best decision.
Over 20 years, VC backed boards have become less discuplined, I would argue as a result of competition. One casualty of that trend is “waiving” required audits. As SPACs create new opportunities, many companies will be hung up on the audit requirement. Self inflicted wound.
The two main things to make hybrid workforces work are: offsites and async decision making. If you're good at these two things, you're 70% of the way there.
I’m so happy to be engaged with
@thelaurafiuza
- not sure how I’d be able to handle the stress of the last few days without her support. Thank you my love for being the best sounding board ❤️
Brex for Life Sciences launches today! Specific rewards, higher limits, and access to custom payment solutions for biotech, pharma, and therapeutics companies. Our 3rd vertical launch in a year!
Was so excited to launch this. We’ve been working with customers Brex Travel beta for a long time now. Excited to show everyone. I’m so proud of this launch!
Today is the official launch of Brex travel! ✈️
We are now the most unified global spend platform, providing travel booking and management — along with corporate cards, expense management, reimbursements, travel, business accounts, and bill pay — all on
I feel like one of the luckiest things that ever happened to me was meeting
@pedroh96
Neither of us would have done too much if we hadn’t met. After 7 years of working together he still surprises me on how fast he learns and develops. Happy birthday
@pedroh96
!
If you’re motivated by learning, there is nothing better than running a high-growth startup. You get to learn about so many different topics from the most amazing people. Starting with your own team, to investors and other people in the market.
I saw a tweet asking why sometimes when you unsubscribe from an email list it says it can ‘take a few days’. Buckle up, as I have a RIDICULOUS story about this happening in The Enterprise™️...
I hear a lot of people saying they don't like business books. I actually find some of them to be quite good! My favorites are quite cliché: The Innovators Dilemma & Solution, Crossing the chasm and Essays of warren buffet! What are your favorites?
I was in a dinner with a lot of enterprise CEOs and someone asked: “Who plans go increase spend in enterprise software next year?”. Almost everyone raised their hand…
Salesforce growing 24% at $30 Billion in ARR, no slowdown yet:
“We’re just not seeing material impact on the broader economic world that all of you are in,” Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s co-founder and co-CEO, said on a conference call with analysts.
Congratulations to
@Opendoor
on becoming a public company! We're proud to call you a long-time customer, and we applaud how you have reimagined the real estate experience to support people at life's most important moments.
Competitors are getting aggressive! One of our semi-competitors went through trouble of redirecting Brex employee's IP addresses to their careers page. So now my household can only access their website on a hotspot! Is this the corporate version of twitter blocking? 😅
The Brazilian national music industry is amazing - out of the top 50 most listened songs in Brazil on Spotify, 47 right now are from Brazilian artists!
9/9 As a company founded on the idea of dreaming big, we believe that talent and opportunities should be married to maximize the potential of people, regardless of their background and immigration status.
We built Brex Cash to be the sole operating account you need to run your business. It’s easy to set up, earn, and use—plus zero fees on ACH and wire transfers, high yield and Brex points earned on every payment.
More details here, would love your support:
Today, we talk to Brex co-founder and CEO
@hdubugras
about building a financial center of gravity for businesses.
Learn about:
🐣What Brex v1 looked like
📨Creating a successful hiring pipeline
🇧🇷🇺🇸 Building in Brazil vs. the US
🚦 +/- of remote working
For founders concerned with the stability of their banking provider, we are working to fast track new
@BrexHQ
Business Account applications. Funds are fully backed by US-government securities, or kept in FDIC-insured bank accounts. Sign-up here:
1/5 Went to a dinner at an Art Museum last night (I know, I know, LA cliché) and came back a lot more bullish on NFTs but especially on
@OpenSea
. My two main concerns were: how do you prevent forgery and why can’t just anyone scrape the blockchain and sell these NFTs?
6/9 This is not a matter of choosing between Americans vs immigrants. The job market is not a zero-sum game, because attracting the best global talent improves local talent and local companies.
I have a friend who is an MIT 2014 CS grad that is moving to the US and wants to work at a FAANG. I'd hire him if he wanted to work at a growth stage startup. Can anyone help me refer him so it doesn't get lost in the sea of applications?
B2B companies underinvest and undervalue brand. Differently than D2C, they don’t need it to survive, so they ignore it. But remember - in the end of the day you’re selling to people and people buy the brands they like.
Lazarte's
@benchmark
move comes after Amazon vet Peter Hill took over as CEO at nearly $3B valued Wildlife.
He's also a board director at
@brexHQ
, where CEO
@hdubugras
says Lazarte has helped with recruiting and marketing strategy, among other things.
"With Premium, you can simply forward an invoice to bills
@brex
.com, and we will parse it, process the payment with Brex Cash, and upload it to your ERP automatically!"
I just visited Singapore around thanksgiving. A lot of interesting learnings, but it's crazy to me how much the entire population speaking english can change a country's trajectory.
What an awesome way to start the day—thrilled that Brex has been named
#2
on
@CNBC
’s Disruptor 50 list! It was great chatting with
@andrewrsorkin
this morning about the fintech landscape and what’s next for
@BrexHQ
. Here are some highlights in this 🧵
Completely agree. Obviously many investors will disagree because they don’t want the dilution. Founders, it is fair and you do have leverage. Don’t fall into the false narrative of “you already own so much of the company, that should be enough incentive”.
Seeing founder/CEOs with zero forward vesting equity, long after their founder equity has fully vested.
Long tenured founder/CEOs: if you’ve already vested all your founder stock and are wondering if it’s fair that you’re continuing without a new grant, let me be clear: it’s
Most of the crossover funds managers I talked to recently are spending 90%+ of their time on the public side. Probably a good opportunity for a private-only investor to get into good companies right now.
I'm impressed with how fast engineering around the world is improving. I think there was a view that SV companies that "outsource" engineering to LatAm or India are trading quality for cost. This was true in the past, but not true anymore. Quality can be the same.
Today we launch our direct integration with Netsuite - proud that Brex is the first corporate card to do so. One step forward for companies, founders, operators that want streamlined finances and the ability to close your books super fast!
Now Amazon sellers can get instant access to their sales. This is one of the features I was most excited about shipping because It wouldn't be possible if we hadn't built most of our financial technology stack from scratch.