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SCALING FAST AND COMPOUNDING SUCCESS WITH BREX CO-FOUNDERS & CO-CEOS, HENRIQUE DUBUGRAS AND PEDRO FRANCESCHI

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SEASON 3, EPISODE 3

SCALING FAST AND COMPOUNDING SUCCESS WITH BREX CO-FOUNDERS & CO-CEOS, HENRIQUE DUBUGRAS AND PEDRO FRANCESCHI

 

 

As Co-Founders and Co-CEOs of fintech startup Brex, Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi are true “friendpreneurs” – a​​nd they’re not even 30 years old. As teens, they met over Twitter in Brazil, hacking and jailbreaking their way through high school. After their payment startup Pagar.me (“basically the Stripe of Brazil”) achieved success, they left Brazil for Silicon Valley, where they used their unique insight into the payments landscape to start Brex in 2017. Originally offering credit cards to startups, Brex has moved and scaled at incredible speed, reaching $100 million in revenue just 18 months after launch, and expanding from credit cards into a global spend management platform that both startups and enterprise customers rely on. Today, the company is valued at more than $12 billion. But scaling this big, this fast hasn’t always been smooth. Henrique and Pedro share their journey, wisdom, and experience managing risk and making tough decisions and pivots. They also explain how their complementary skillsets, friendship, drive, and long-view approach fuel their ambition to build Brex into a global fintech powerhouse – one that’s challenging established financial services and payments players.

“Scale is like a blessing and a curse. The secret of scaling a company is, how do you become a big company with the mindset of a small company? A very important predictor of leadership success at Brex is the ability for someone to operate at all levels.”
Pedro FranceschiCo-Founder and Co-CEO, Brex

LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE TO LEARN:

  • The importance of staying nimble and close to customers during periods of intense growth (and what you risk losing if you don’t)
  • Insights on scaling – why “scale is like a blessing and a curse,” and the risks associated with underestimating diseconomies of scale 
  • Lessons in leadership – how the ability to operate across multiple levels of the business is an important predictor of leadership success
  • What drove the difficult decision behind Brex's pivot away from serving small business customers and towards serving VC-backed, scaling startups and large enterprises
  • What it was like having a front-row seat to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (Pedro: “Pretty crazy!”; Henrique: “A surreal experience.”), how Brex was well-positioned to benefit from it, and the challenges and lessons learned from that experience 
  • AI’s impact on the future of financial services and financial software, and prospects for the increased globalization of fintech 
  • Valuable advice for founders and entrepreneurs, including finding "founder/market fit” and maintaining a healthy, equitable co-founder relationship (hint: Talk. A lot!) 

NEVER MISS AN EPISODE

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