No, that’s not exactly how we think about it. When we started Brex, one of the things we realized is that a lot of the reasons why payments and spending were broken was because you always ended up at the bank. In the end, you’re always trying to work with the banks and use their technology and their software, and you’re always limited by them.
Yeah, that’s what I’m drilling down into here. There’s a set of backend financial services or travel services, and then it seems like Brex is just a much better, more streamlined, more controllable interface to a lot of things that are antiquated in the backend. We sold that company, and then we got to the US and we were like, “You know what? We’re tired of fintech and all these banks and regulations. We don’t want to do that anymore. We want to do something at the bleeding edge of technology, like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs — you know, all the visionaries that were in Silicon Valley.” VR came to mind as the next computing platform. We got into YC with this VR idea, but we decided to give up a couple of weeks in.
That was the first value proposition, and it only worked for venture-backed companies, because the only thing that was different was the fact that we were underwriting that way. Then what happened was that a lot of these companies grew. We acquired a lot of companies in 2017, 2018, and now five years later, they’re bigger.
The way Brex is structured is traditionally; we’re functional. We still haven’t moved, I would say, to business units or anything like that. We have product, product engineering, sales, comms, and HR as some of the functions directly reporting to my co-CEO, Pedro [Franceschi]. Then, unusually, you have a co-CEO. You mentioned him already; his name is Pedro. How do you divide up the work with your co-CEO? That relationship doesn’t always work.Look, we’ve been working together for 10 years now, and it works really well. The way we do it is internal versus external. I have zero direct reports, which is amazing.That is the dream. I’m not that great of a manager. I do everything external — fundraising, big customer meetings, partnerships, press, et cetera.
Then he gets all the teams aligned on executing on the changes that we decided. In the past, it was a little bit like the features. Right now, the teams talk to customers directly to get the features, scope it out, and prioritize. Product strategy, for example, is one of the main things that we both discuss and debate on a lot to get to conclusions.question. You’re the co-CEO, you’ve obviously founded a number of companies, and you have a partner that you’ve worked with for a long time.