Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy - Henrique Dubugras - Building the Financial Center of Gravity – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 35]

Episode Date: May 27, 2021

My guest today is Henrique Dubugras, co-founder and CEO of Brex, an all-in-one finance account for businesses. Brex recently raised funding at a valuation of over 7 billion dollars despite being founded only four years ago. In our conversation, we cover Brex’s transition from a credit card for start-ups to the central account for businesses, why building that central account was orders of magnitude more difficult than expected, and the difference between building a business in Brazil and the US. We also discussed Henrique’s term horizon for building Brex and how that impacts his decision-making for the business. Please enjoy my conversation with Henrique Dubugras.   For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here. ----- Founder's Field Guide is a property of Colossus, Inc. For more episodes of Founder's Field Guide, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.   Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here.   Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus   Show Notes [00:02:53] - [First question] - The state of the B2B financial world before Brex [00:06:29] - How such a high margin space was generally underserved [00:08:24] - What the first version of the Brex card looked like [00:10:48] - How long it took to build and launch their infrastructure [00:11:13] - Why market penetration is so low for cards in B2B businesses [00:13:14] - How he thinks about this landscape in Brazil versus the US [00:14:55] - What interchange and high margins allows him to pass on to the consumer [00:16:23] - Brex’s first revenue event [00:17:38] - What the biggest hurdle was to overcome when they launched [00:19:02] - Key marketing strategy early on and what made it successful [00:21:16] - Continued distribution lessons they learned from their initial success [00:22:39] - Building an effective sales force to push their product [00:24:41] - What makes the current landscape so fertile for fintech businesses [00:27:12] - Analysis of their unique funding round dynamics [00:28:42] - Their second product and the insight that lead to that decision [00:31:05] - Darkest moments while trying to build their central account [00:31:50] - What their central account allows them to facilitate writ large [00:35:27] - Notable differences between entrepreneurship in Brazil versus the US [00:38:55] - Observations on inefficiencies in the US startup space [00:40:16] - Pros, cons, and costs of being largely remote [00:41:50] - Keys to building a successful hiring pipeline [00:44:05] - Lessons learned about decision making and optimization [00:45:39] - Developing an effective skill set to convince other people of anything [00:47:35] - What excites him about being a part of Brex lately [00:49:13] - What excites him about the future in general [00:50:39] - His business philosophy and the set of principles that guide him  [00:52:03] - Nuances that make focusing on a single problem so attractive [00:53:51] - Long term infrastructure decisions that will pay off in the end [00:55:12] - Thoughts and hi perspective on cash flow in general [00:58:18] - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him

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My guest today is Enrique Dubugras, co-founder and CEO of Brex, an all-in-one finance account for businesses. Brex recently raised funding at a valuation of over $7 billion, despite being founded only four years ago. In our conversation, we cover Brex's transition from a credit card for startups to the central account for businesses. While building that central account was orders of magnitude more difficult than expected and the difference between building a business in Brazil and the U.S. We also discussed Enrique's long-term horizon for building Brex and how that impacts his

decision-making for the business. Please enjoy my conversation with Enrique Dubugros. I was thinking about where to begin this conversation. I'm enamored by this idea. I've thought of recently that all the best ideas come when you're making things. things, not thinking about things. And I think Brex is a good example of this where you stumbled upon a frustration or a problem that has now led to this fascinating business. And I'm really curious how you would describe the B2B financial system when you stumbled upon this frustration.

Like what was the state of the system? What did it feel like? And that'll be a good excuse to then talk through the sequence of what you've built so far. When Pedro and I started our first company, Pogarman, I would say that that was pretty like stumbled. We were, trying to think of a startup idea and he worked at a payments company. I had had a bad experience of payment. So we decided let's start a payments company and that's exactly how it went. And not a lot of thought behind it. I think we were lucky because especially in this is 2013, it's a great growing market anywhere

in the world in the US and in Brazil as well, we were doing it. And for three and a half years, we were serving B2B financial services to businesses. And when we sold the company, we got to the US, we tried to pivot out of it and do something else in PINC. Our head kept going back to B2B financial services. It's kind of the thing we were doing for a long time. And the U.S. seemed like a very competitive place. So we just wanted to do that. So when we started Brexit, it was a little bit more, I would say, planned than when we started our first company.

That we actually were looking. This is going through YC. The partners are definitely helping us explore this a lot. what are the B2B financial services that have an opportunity in the U.S. And we thought of a lot of them. We thought about starting with business checking accounts, but it didn't seem that anyone would give their money to these two random Brazilians that showed up.

And then we saw, I think, New Bank doing really well, starting with credit cards in Brazil. And we thought that's like an interesting thing. And then they were going to bank accounts and other stuff. And it happened that we tried to get a credit card for our business. and we didn't have FICO because we just arrived in the U.S. and we couldn't get a card. And we're like, okay, we also don't have that much money in the U.S. Let's ask our friends around.

And it turns out, like, people with like millions of dollars couldn't get a card. And we thought that was like really stupid. Why can't you have millions of dollars? I get so much money where we come from. Why can't you get like a card for like $10,000 limit, you know, to pay for like AWS and all these other things? So I think that kind of sparked the first market that we went and maybe plan, maybe lucky, but I think it was a really lucky market in a sense that it's very rare that you found a market that is underserved in high margin. As Pedro and I were big fans of innovator's dilemma and usually you find either highly

competitive high margin markets or super low margin, not really competitive markets. And it turns out credit cards for startups, which was their first market, was highly high margin and very underserved. That's why and how we started there. And the vision definitely evolved a little bit over the years, but it's pretty similar when we started that basically all-in-one finance for like businesses. And what that means is integrating financial services. So traditional like bank products like credit cards, business accounts, lending with traditional software products such as expense management, bill pay,

what's you can payroll. And it's unclear like what are things we're going to build ourselves or what we're going to partner. We have great partners for some of these things today. And if we find a great partner and that works really well with us, we're happy to do that. Or if we don't find a great partner will build our ourselves in an integrated way. But we want to create this single place people can go to manage your finances. Say a bit more about why you think a high margin space was underserved. It seems like a non-natural state of a business world for that to be the case. Why was that? Was there some weird inertia or legacy problem that caused that to be possible? I think that the reason that was true is because startups are kind of like a new segment. It

It hasn't been since maybe the last 10 to 11 years in which serving startups is a thing that is big enough for people to consider. So what happened is that big banks always categorize startups as small businesses. Startups as well businesses are the same thing. The reality is they're not the same thing. Startups are more closer to a mid-size and mid-market business than they are to like a small business in terms of economics for banks. So no one was selling to these people.

No one was considering them, giving them a white glove treatment. And that was like an opportunity. So I think it was more of a, I would say, categorization even segmentation issue for the banks than anything else. And I think that obviously there was a technological barrier, which was our first underwriting model was this, the base of our underwriting model today, is what we call a dynamic model instead of a static model. A dynamic model means that we re-underwrite every business every day.

day we're getting new data about the business and remaking the decision, do we increase the limit, do we decrease the limit, to keep the limit stable? Which is highly different than a bank does because they basically say, hey, this is your limit, and unless you default, this is your limit. And maybe you can convince me to increase it over time, but this is kind of it for good or for bad. And that doesn't work for startups because startups have, they start with a million dollars, but they go to zero pretty quickly.

So you kind of need to have this real-time nature that was really hard for the bank's old technology systems to adapt because their old technology size systems only supported the static limits that you can only like do it and not change anything after. Can you describe maybe what each of the options were to serve startups? You mentioned checking banking cards. Like there's a couple different ways to attack or gain a new customer. And then obviously in financial services, you often have the ability to cross sell a lot and create new services, which you've done. What was it uniquely about the card business that you felt made sense? And what is the card business? Everyone understands like swiping a card to pay for something, but behind the scenes, what technology was required

for you to build versus stuff you partnered with? Like, what was V1 of the product like to build? I think that being like 100% honest, the decision of card had also to do that we knew a lot about cards because we were processing payments on the other side. So if we were to do term loans or we were to do like business checking accounts, we didn't know that much about it versus cards. we kind of knew a lot about it. I think that played a big part of the decision was the fact that cards were within our zone of knowledge. The hard part of what we do,

and I think the part of the people underestimate about Brexit, they look at the website and there's all these cool features and rewards and they're like, I understand, but behind that there's a huge amount of building infrastructure. Our opinion on the market is the reason that banks don't innovate is not because they don't have the ideas. Stintech they go and have the ideas because they're bound with legacy technology.

like FIS or Pfizer that has been built over 30 plus years, that is really, really hard to change. If you ask any bank CEO, you're going to tell you the same team, yeah, everything takes $50 million in a year to do. And we knew about that because by interacting with Brazilian banks, we had to interact for them. A core premise of Brexit is we're going to rebuild all the infrastructure from scratch. We're not going to rely on any legacy technology from anyone else. So it took us a while to launch because we had to rebuild a lot of that infrastructure from scratch. And by infrastructure, I mean, hey, the KYC engines. How do I verify your ID and know who you are, do all the checks and we need for compliance.

AML risk models, the core ledger to know how much is the balance, the authorization system to see which transaction can go through, which transaction can go through fraud systems to detect the transactions, which transactions are fraudulent. And I can go on and on and on of like a huge, like the reward system. It's just a lot of stuff that traditionally banks and vendors, people, other companies all use vendors, for and we basically rebuilt everything from scratch and that took a long time, but it's what allowed us to innovate. How long did it take to build that stuff? It's still building to today, right? We build a bare minimum to launch in 2018.

And one of the reasons we only worked to startups is, look, to build faster. We built it in a way that only worked for startups. We asked things in the KIC like, who's your investor? And what you obviously like is a question that doesn't make sense for outside of tech businesses, but we relied on it early on in order to launch faster. But till this day, we're building a lot of this infrastructure. a lot of this infrastructure. I think people would be shocked by the, we'll call it market share that credit cards have

of B-to-B payments. It's ridiculously low, like low single digits, whereas maybe it's half or more for consumer purchases or payments on credit cards. What drives that difference? Obviously, you've already been successful and yet the market share is still that low. So that's probably a good thing for your future. But it's also just a crazy low penetration from what one might expect. What drives that?

Why is so much of it still cash or HCH? And just legacy. suppliers always took payments. The other thing that makes a stat a little bit misleading is I think when they do these stats, it's all a volume. It's not a number of purchases. So there's a lot of U2B payments that are in the order of tens of millions of dollars or hundreds of millions of dollars.

I think it's going to be hard for that kind of stuff to go on card and pay the fee a couple percentage points. But I think it's changing a lot. And this is huge of accelerated to COVID. we were February or January 2020. And if you looked at the amounts of our total GMV that came from companies like Facebook and Google, it was a certain number, a certain percentage points. And then after the pandemic, that number is like much higher because a lot of other stuff

went down and this stuff went up. So as higher margin vendors become a bigger percentage of the total supplier payments, I think that penetration is going to increase. If you look at a tech company, actually a lot of their B2B payments are a car because the supply they buy from take card and there's high margin businesses. So that Slack, Facebook, Google, AWS, all these different businesses that are tech businesses and they like credit cards versus if you go to like a more traditional business, a restaurant, like maybe the wholesale food provider I'm buying from only takes checks because they only take some time for a long time. So that's the way. But if some new startup comes around

that does wholesale food for restaurants, that takes card and starts growing a lot, it's probably going to shift the penetration. I'd be really curious coming from Brazil, having built a payments business there, there's unique features of the U.S. market, especially interchange. Credit card fees are higher here structurally than most of the rest of the world. How do you think about that as someone building a business where that's a key part of your revenue model is interchange and the U.S. is so different? What did your experience from Brazil relative to your experience in Brazil in the U.S.?

What does that taught you? How does it make you think about the future of the business model? The most interesting thing for me is how much U.S. consumers are obsessed with points. It was the craziest thing when I got here. People were like, oh, I love my points. Really? Like, love is the word you described about points. And everyone has a friend, points free that has 18 different credit cards, you optimize here and there.

So it's very cultural, which was quite interesting. me coming from outside. And there's also some of the reasons I get more comfortable to interchange not going to get regulated in the US. It's like you would have a pretty vocal group of people that will not like that decision because it would kill the points. Can you describe why it would kill points just so people understand? Yeah. So the reason we kill points is because today out of the, let's say, roughly 2% that banks make on the cards, a lot of times more than half of that goes back into the point system. And if they kill that, they say, hey, interchange now is 1%, they don't have enough

margins, you do that anymore. So it would die. It happened with Europe, a lot of places they regulated at no points. So it was quite interesting. But I actually like interchange business models a lot because it allows you to subsidize a lot of stuff that the consumer would normally pay for, but they don't have to pay for because the interchange model. What's an example maybe beyond points? There was points the primary way that that happens. Like what is interchange and the high margins that they provide to the company allow you to pass on to the consumer? A lot of cards have higher grace periods. You close your statement one day and then you have like 30 to 45 days to pay it.

60 days to pay for since the first day. Like at least when I come from Brazil, 60 days to pay something is going to cost you 10%. So it definitely allows some funding and working capital needs. I think the other thing is look, we have now a business account that we don't charge any wires, ECH or anything like that. All interchange subsidized because we have interchange, we can like give all these fees for free. We just launched premium and we charge $49 a month for it, which is cheaper than any other software. If you were to buy like expense file bill.com on any software to compete with it, it's dramatically more expensive.

$30 per user or something like that. We're like $49 all in. Why is that viable for us? Interchange subsidized. Time doesn't charge any fees. There's a lot of stuff that is only possible because of the interchange business model that allows consumers to actually. playable by speeds. It makes me think of in the asset management world, it's quite interesting. The business model is to charge a percentage of assets under management, but it's not a check. It's a scrape from the account. If you could imagine someone writing a big account, a $10 million check or something to a manager, it would be crazy. But the fact that it's hidden automatically,

psychology barrier to change that interchange seems to share. One like little idea that stood out reading about the business was this notion that for a startup, it should be as easy to open a Brexit account as it is to like get a new email address or something and should happen that fast and that the underwriting was totally different. Like you said, you asked for people's investors names, you check their cash balances, did very unique things for a unique customer segment. Talk me through like the first couple sales or even just the first sale that you had as a company where a company adopted Brex as their credit card. Like what did it take to get there? What do you think was responsible for it? I love the very first revenue event of a business. The first time I actually thought, oh, I think

this is going to work. I received a cold email from Alex Wayne, who's the founder of Scale of a big company. And he's like, hey man, I heard from my roommate that you guys are building a credit card. I couldn't get an amics because I'm 19 and I don't have a FICO score yet. Can you guys hook me up in a beta? I'm like, yeah. That was our first real customer. And the first time I was like, okay, cool. I guess people won't need this. What we're building is not going to be useless. So, the cards in person to him. I could only mail a card store office at that point. So went there and helped him set up. I sent him to the password under the email, which is probably not secure. But it worked out. What was happening or what was breaking, I should say, in the early days?

Because if you look at your business's history, it sort of had instant fit with the market. Like it just started to work very quickly. People were pulling it out of you. Growth is awesome like that. But it's also can be very painful. What was breaking the most? What was the most pain thing to have to overcome in those early days? The most painful thing was in order to start the business, we couldn't start with a credit card. We had to start it with a prepaid card that we pre-funded for you and then you paid us back later. But the card was flagged as a prepaid card. So it didn't work a bunch of places. We would have people like going like Instacard on Instacart didn't accept our

card because prepaid cards are a pretty big source for fraud. So I get why they do it. But We couldn't get a credit bin like the credit card at that point. And it just didn't work for random places. And we're like, okay, that sucks. Customers called it's like furious when that happened. How did you fix it? The way we did it and started out of Marquette to get up and running fast. And that was the only option they had at the time.

And at the same time, we started working on getting our own deal and our own partnership with our own partnership with our bank, but getting a partnership of a bank when you're still, it takes a while. So between getting the partnership and building all of our software and stuff took like over a year. That was the main issue early on, but we had eventually got it. What was the key marketing strategy or lesson early on? Like, it seemed like you guys sort of came out of nowhere and all of a sudden were everywhere. How much of that was organic, how much of it was intentional and deliberate? What did you do differently from a marketing standpoint in the early days around the card,

specifically that you think was so successful? Do you think? So one is an extremely, extremely clear message, which is credit card for startups. Everyone know where the credit card is. Everyone know what startup says. No question of what we do. No question of what we refer. This is a hard problem where like some businesses aren't not that easy. Like for example, even our business today, we do so much stuff and we're calling ourselves all everyone to finance or businesses. It's not as clear as it was, credit card for startups. And it's hard. I can't think of anything better. But I think early on we're one product for one segment, so it was super easy to like just say, hey, this is what we do. This is who we're for. And I think that's very powerful. And I think no one at the point was like

not marketing specifically for startups. No one was saying like, hey, this is for startups. Some people are saying, this is for the fastest growing businesses. This is for SMBs, but no one is saying like for startups. And the second point is our target market was kind of small in terms of number of companies. There was only like 70,000 startups in the US. So none of the paid ads worked for us. We couldn't target on Google and Facebook startups. So we had to be more creative of marketing because the traditional stuff, like whatever thing is like, I'm just going to buy pay marketing. And for us, it didn't work. So what do we do? We adopted this pretty well-known outdoor strategy. Most startups start San Francisco. And the ones that aren't, they come to visit to raise

money here. Let's just market in San Francisco. And we got all the billboards in the city for like $300,000. Not all of them, but like a good chunk of them. And everyone just knew us immediately. like three months after, everyone knew with breakfast. And it works super well. I think people, I would like to say I was the creative genius behind it. I wasn't. Our head of sales, Sam, had the idea and executed on it and did a great job. I love this incredible clarity and focus of message and then incredible clarity and

narrowness of delivery. So just pick exactly where your customers are in a unique way and that's it. And it just worked. How has that evolved since? You've told that story before. I love the story. It's one worth retelling for its elegance. What sense has changed about how you think about growing the Brex brand, about reaching the right

customers where they live? What continued distribution lessons have you learned from that early elegant success? Look, I think we're relearning a lot now. It's really hard going from one product to one segment for like four products now to many segments. I would say that the only insights we have till this day that I would advise people is like, I think a lot of founders in Silicon Valley, they're engineers, and their dream is just to build a software that you just put it online and people pay for. And that's it. And you make money. And look, our business has a lot of not so sexy parts. Financing costs, we just did a securization. We have all this infrastructure work. We have a lot of people. We have a lot of ops and credit and collections

and calling people to give our money back. There's a lot of parts that are to pronounce. But Like, we had a sales force and outbound sales force pretty early on. And it really well for us. And it works really well for us still this day. And I think a lot of people have this mentality of, hey, let's build a product in their come. I think we were the opposite. We were like, let's go after every single customer that we can.

We had like very, very aggressive outbound sales from the very beginning until this day. And what did you learn about building, or have you learned about building an effective Salesforce? I typically would think of like an enterprise sales force selling whatever it is. $500,000 contracts or something like this and there's the annual quota. How does what you've done with sales differ from like a traditional enterprise sales organization? I think that we were very experimental. We weren't afraid to iterate. And our sales leader, Sam, was very scrappy that he didn't just come here and say, hey, this is my playbook. Let's go and do it. I think the way he thought about

is let's keep iterating the messaging. Let's keep iterating your tactics and kind of this continuously improving cycle. And our view was, hey, let's call customers. Let's email them. Let's get them on the phone. And if you can get them on the phone, they're higher chances than convert. And let's make the economics work for that. I think in the beginning, we really wanted people to buy us for a very specific reason. I think Sam told us, like, they're going to buy us for the reason they're going to bias. Just embrace it and sell it and make the sales simple. I think that was the other thing that he taught us that I thought that was quite interesting. In Pungar, I mean, we were selling our first business, like we were selling APIs for developers

to build payment to them on top of it. It's like pretty complicated sale. When we got to Brex, we wanted to sell them on the automation of their books or the feature of the receipts. And Sam was like, look, I think people love that. It's awesome. But man, we can give higher limits of amazing rewards. Let's just get them on for that.

Let's just get them on for that. They're going to love all the other features, but let's just make the sale simple. The value proposition is super clear and more people will sign up. I guarantee you, I'm like, okay, and it actually screw. People after they enjoy and actually love all of our software features, but a lot of times when you're signing up, they're excited about the rewards. You're excited about the limits. There's an interesting line from Scott Belski.

He talks about window dressing in stores. The thing that gets you in the door isn't necessarily, is typically not even the thing you buy or ultimately care about or go back for, but you need to get somebody in the door. Simple and attractive and unique is good. Kind of an interesting example of that. Great point. I'm going to steal that. The thing that I've noticed recently in the last call at five

years is this just enormous explosion of fintech businesses, of financial services going digital, whether that's neobanks or what you're building or so many others are successfully building. Why now? What is it about this environment that you think has become so fertile for all of a sudden there to be this Cambrian explosion of financial services technology businesses? I think that fintechs have been a concept that should exist for a long time. You're building a startup. if you think of money like Uber, people said, hey, this is how much cabs making a year. So believing in Uber required you to believe in that the market was going to expand. You had to believe that, which is a kind of a hard thing to believe.

If you look at FinTech, there's like hundreds of billions of profits every year from banks. So it's an existing profit pool of legacy players that are pretty fragmented sped in the US. This should have been disrupted a long time. So the question is like, why not? Why wasn't it disrupted a long time ago? There's two things for me that changed. So one, there was this belief that banks had an inherent advantage in order to serve customers because financial service is what always thought is lending. The purpose of banks is to lend.

So they have their ability to use the positives to lend, so they have an inherent event. And I think what happens is 10, 12 years ago when Stripe and Square and a bunch of other companies started, people started realizing that FinTech is about more than lending. There's all these other profit pools in FinTech around payments, around accounts, around cards, etc all these different profit goals that are more transactional more payments less balance sheet heavy it started an unbundling of that and a few companies became really successful like striped and square incredibly successful companies so it allowed i think investors to start investing a lot into fintech and actually that makes a big difference in fintech because it is a capital intensive

business we raised 57 million dollars pre-launch if you ask me why did you raise so much money for you launch and the reason was when I went to a bank we wanted to see that we had a balance sheet they wanted to see that we had to seven million dollars in the bank count and they were going to be fine they don't like scrapping this they don't like you having nine or ten months of runway they wanted you to have many years of runway the availability of capital of fintech being able to raise a lot of money allowed to the partnerships the access of capital markets a lot of these things that weren't possible before to build a little bit more capital intensive businesses and payments so I think that that

That's a big part of why it started happening. I mean, a typical large seed round today pre-launch round would be like $5 million. That's an order of magnitude bigger. Talk me through that unique dynamic. What was the strategy there? How did you arrive at that amount? What was the way you structured the narrative or the incentives? It's just very unique.

It wasn't all in one round. It was in two rounds. So the first round was a $7 million round that we raised. And I think at that point, we just optimized for getting like, who were the best people in mid-second? how do we get a market? I think we did a good job getting a few of them. So we got Mickey from Rabbit, which is one of the most successful investors and fit

ticket, not the most successful. And then we got Max, Lephton, Peter Thiel, you know, all these people. They were quite helpful for us starting. And then after a year, we had maybe like 100 beta customers after this round, March, April. And YC came around and said, wow, like we've seen a lot of companies trying to do credit cards and they never launched. They never had any customers. And that's something we realized actually earlier on is like, all people tried to do.

what we're doing, it never worked. And then we had 100 customers. So it was actually preemptive. They came by and said, hey, we want to preempt your next round. Then there was a whole negotiation process and onto invested 50 million in that round. And it was not obvious at all. We had 100 customers, literally. But it allowed us to do a lot of the things we needed to do to grow the business. And like that capital was incredibly, incredibly important for us. Honestly, I give her credit to seeing that what we were doing was actually hard and we deserve that shot at that point. She's such a badass. I love her. Amazing. She's the best. The interesting next stage for me of the businesses, so you've got this very simple message, very simple, clear service to a segment or a

niche. And then the story from then to now has been one of expansion. You already mentioned it. Lots of different segments, products, messages. Talk me through what you've learned or what you did to drive the decisions that you made to get to here. So like how did you make your second major, what was and how did you make your second major product decision? And I want to kind of draw that line to what the business looks like today. The hardest decision that we've made was building cash, our business account. It was September, October, 2018.

The card had just launched. And it was getting a lot of traction. You know, we had just raised our billion dollar round. This is probably like three months after launch. And we made a decision to basically get 75% of our resources and invest in a new product. It was not obvious at all. Our board was like, I'm sure you want to do this? Again, think of a lot of companies that have a successful first product and what they

do is take all the resources from that product and put it in an improving product. But we just had like super high conviction. I give this credit to my co-founder. So I had some conviction, but we used to say we just need to survive until we have our business account. And the reason we did that was we, we just have. We always thought that having the core accounts, the checking account, was where the center of gravity was for the customer.

If you had that, you could cross-sell anything. If you didn't have that, it was much harder to cross-sell stuff. So that was number one. And number two is we could only have, build the most beautiful experience of card, have the limits be like the highest, stable. We didn't rely on third-party data aggregators like Platt or Finlay because they're great companies. Look, honestly, I'm super respectful. I love Platt.

business, but it fails a lot. Not because of them, because the banks have these legacy technology disconnect shit all the time or a bunch of issues. So it doesn't work as well as it could have, I called the bank for good. But it provided like somewhat of a bad experience a lot of times our customers. We're like, look, there's no way to solve it besides the customer uses our own accounts. So we diverted all the resources and started building it. And honestly, man, it took twice as long, three times as many people. It was like a lot harder than we expected. But it works really well now and it's growing really, really fast, and I don't regret it at one inch, but it was probably the most non-obvious decision had to make. It's very clear the philosophy behind why make the decision

to own the sort of place of record for a business's finance or the center of gravity, a nice way of putting it. What was like the darkest moment for you of that piece of the business's story building the central account? I think it was when we kept pushing launch months, and we thought we were going to build this in six months. In a year, and we still don't mind to launch. You're like, are we bad? We're not team bad? Like, what's happening? We promised all these investors that is going to be the launch. It wasn't. And it sucked because I felt like I was misleading people. And I generally wasn't. It's really a mistake. But I think I had an amazing investment. It was super supportive. But it was a lot harder than it was expecting. And then now that you've accomplished that and it's

going to be, I assume, a fixture of the business and sort of that central point of gravity. why and how and what does that unlock around it. So you had an interesting on-ramp. Now you've built a locust, the center of gravity here in cash and the central account. What's exciting about what that allows for in the future for Brex, this all-in-one financial concept? I would say three things.

So I'll give you like three examples of things that rely on this integration that we're super excited about that weren't positive for it. So the first one is around reporting. So before, if you think about reporting on your business, you have your amics statement. You have your bank statement. You have your bill.com statement. You have your expensive statement.

You have all these different statements that some accounts in the end of the month goes, reconciles everything, takes some time and gives you a report. Hey, this is your business. For Brex, it takes 10 business days after the closing of the month. For small business, it can take months.

Accounts aren't their goods, et cetera. So if you have everything on Brex, you pick all of your bills on Brex, all your car transactions, all your reimbursements, like everything is in one place. We can actually give you real-time reporting in your business, which is where your money is going and what are you spending it on in real-time, create independency for the business owner from like the finance team or the

accounting to go and like the reporting. Obviously, not going to be like perfect, perfect, but it's going to be like 90 plus percent of the way there. I think that's one example. And it's not possible to do that by just stitching together a bunch of data from different places. You actually need to own the data. For example, if you pay Facebook through a card and you pay Facebook through a bill pay, or to real bank transactions, that needs to go to the same Facebook in your reporting. And you can't do that if it's just coming from like a bunch of different places to data. So that's like one example. Second examples are in credit. I think that there's a lot of interesting credit products that we can build. The first one being what we call instant payouts,

which is a product we launched three months ago, which basically is we connect to all the marketplaces. So PayPal, Stripe, Shopify, Amazon, etc. And instead of making the money available for you in two, three days or 14 days in Amazon, we can pay you instantly. Instantly, you can have access to money. And the only reason that's possible is because we own the account, so we can actually make money available instantly instead of having to rely on ACH and wire to send the money over. We're giving businesses access to their money in real time. Like a sale goes through, you can get access to that sale immediately instead of having to wait for the waiting periods. And whenever the settlement comes, the company like pays us automatically and it's

all good. So that's a nice. product is not possible unless you own that account and you own the integration. You can see everything coming. Each of these companies have individual products that settle into a linear account like Square has their insin deposit product. But maybe I don't sell only through square. I sell through Square. It's right. So I only get into the positive for half my money. It's a fascinating thing. It's like this idea of, you've mentioned a few times, static processes that Brex is turning into streaming processes. Static to streaming is such a fascinating thing. for tech businesses to attack.

I'm familiar with this business Vanta, which does SOC2 compliance. It's the same concept. Like instead of some auditor that are coming once per year and saying, stamp, you're compliant. It's constant monitoring

of your compliance. It seems like what you've done is attacked all the static points of the financial services stack for a company and turned them streaming. Is that like a fair summation? Pretty fair summation. And like in financial service,

everything is in batch of standards because of banks and we're turning it all into real time. So like literally that's how things we're done before is in batches and now we're doing everything in real time. Yeah. Given that you were successful building and selling a business in Brazil and then coming to the U.S. and doing it outside of just financial services where obviously we talked about interchange already,

but what are the most notable differences between your experience as an entrepreneur there and here? Very different and they're hard in very different ways. I think that many things. I would say there are the biggest difference. So number one is just. sheer volume of capital. Our first company, we raised a million

high eyes, which today is probably around $200,000. At the time it was maybe $400,000. Currency didn't help. But man, it seemed like infinite money. And everyone that came in, like we negotiated their salaries super aggressively. You had a shittiest office. And I took the bus to work.

It's not super safe to take the bus. So I had a super low salary. Like everything was like very tight. Getting to profitability was the main. thing a company had to do. When can you get to profitability is when you started being a real business in Brazil. And when you go to the US and we had $7 million and $57 million and we had like 10 people, you just make different decisions. And look, the companies here are less sufficient. I can tell you for a fact. I know all of them. I know all the companies in Brazil,

they are less efficient, period. But in tech, like it matters some. You don't want to be like super wasteful like because there's obviously the extremes, but it doesn't prevent them from becoming super-calatable. Second thing, difference, and the biggest difference is around executives. It's really hard to hire a head of product in Brazil. Why? There's just, one, there's not, products like not a function. Two, is like there's not many people who've gone through growth stages. So at Brex, we only hired people in our executive team that had gone through successful growth stage in startups. It's the only profile we hire. So just to pick on some, like our head of engineering was early at Stripe, life went a really big to become our head engineering.

He learned a lot about the mistakes that they did. And then we just skipped a bunch of those mistakes. He learned a lot of the stuff that was right about it. And we just copied all of it. And I think that that's like something that just accelerated so much in terms of being able to grow as an organization. We went from like 100 to 400 people in one year. And obviously it was hard, but it was possible. It was only possible because you had people like cause that already knew what to do. And in Brazil, that doesn't exist. You can't hire. There's no such thing because there hasn't been enough cycles of enough startups to have people had gone through that growth phase successfully. Now it's starting to change. There's amazing startups coming out of Brazil, but at the time we were doing that,

it wasn't true. And all my friends that have international companies, that's usually a big issue, right? Because every function in the US, there's someone who did it and went through that growth phase and that helps you accelerate a tonne. And I think the last thing is just bureaucracy. In Brazil, So it took us a month and a half to get an office and internet set up and incorporate the company. Just those three things to come up and a half. In the US, we did it in two days. Except opening a bank kind of getting a credit card.

That took forever. But now it's easier. But the rest of the stuff is super easy and frictionless. And you have to worry about things like labor law and people suing you and taxes. There's all these things you as a founder. I spent like 50% of my time thinking about non-product, non-user stuff versus now I spend 100% my time taking about only important things about the product and the user and the customers. So that also like adds a big amount of friction.

The inefficiency point that you made is really interesting. We've been looking at some businesses that started very capital constrained. And it's amazing like the efficiency that that creates in the culture of the business and also in like the core unit economics of whatever the services or product is. What are the ways that you see most inefficiency in U.S. startups relative to what you saw in Brazil. Where does that inefficiency lie? I think that the biggest point is just R&D. Cost of an engineer in the U.S. is not like two or three times. I'll have it's five, six, seven, ten times more than someone outside of the U.S. Look, I love hiring engineers and we spend a ton of an idea.

I think that's the right thing to do. But it's much harder to be profitable and be efficient. It's just like an EBITDA kind of business with the engineering cost in the U.S. You have to be really big to make it up for it. Versing in these countries, you don't have to be that big in order to like make it up for engineering. So it's just like a five, six X difference in your biggest cost. We do build very complex software, but a lot of businesses don't build that complex software. So is it really worth five, six, seven, eight times the price? And I think remote would really help of this now because I think a lot of businesses will

be able to exist and hire good people in the US, but also hired good people outside of the US and cheaper. I think like remote will make the overall margins of tech and a lot. Talk about the tradeoffs there. I know obviously you're a remote heavy business or remote first business. What are the best things about it that you've learned and best practices and what are the drawbacks?

Like almost everything has some costs. What have you found the costs of being remote to be? We went through the whole journey of the time we're going to remote. We're going to be going to be a better. And I think the conclusion of God is like, look, big companies are going to be built either right. Some companies are going to be remote. Some companies are going to get in a person.

Each of them comes of a set of pros and cons. And the pros for you need to be outweigh the cons. I think that the ability to access global talent, hire people all over the world, is worth almost any common. When we started remote, we thought it was gonna be like we're gonna hire all people in big cities. For example, we opened hiring in Brazil,

and we thought it was gonna be all in Sao Paulo or part of the city. Honestly, there's only one person in Saoile. All the other people we hired are like, in these random places in Brazil. That we would never have to open an office. These people can now like come in and work for Brexit. I think that's like an amazing advantage.

The cons is you have to change everything about your business. You were operating in one way, And I have to change everything. I'm a believer. You actually can make it better with remote than it was before in person. But you have to go through the process and the pain of iterating and changing everything about how you run your company.

And that's a huge con. Like a huge, and the bigger you are, the harder that con is. Because it might take time. It might not work. There's going to be inefficiency in the middle of things that just weren't working that well. You're going to have to iterate and adapt and fix it versus in person. You can just use a playbook.

You can just go and like, oh, this is how this company is to solve this. I mean, just copy it and execute on it. In remote, there's no playbook. We're kind of having to create it from scratch. What have you learned about that recruiting pipeline, 100 to 400 people, is one example hiring all over the world. The second example, this is the lifeblood of technology firms as talented people. How have you built a good pipeline there? What's been key to your success? What would you do differently if you had to redo it? It seems like hiring is just like an absolutely critical thing to get right. I think the most important thing for us is have a talent for its culture, which is adapt your processes, adapt your stuff in order to have the best talent.

I think a lot of times HR teams come in and they want to standardize everything, they want to make everything a process because it makes their life easier. And I don't know, our head of people has been amazing about this, that he doesn't let administrative burden prevent us from doing the decisions that are the best to recruit talent. So, for example, we have a pretty unique comp model. When you come to Brex, you get a total comp offer, let's say $100,000 just to make a math. And you can choose how much equity, how much cash you want.

You can choose I want 90K cash, 10,000K equity, you can choose 60K cash, 40K equity. You can make that split. There's a lot of HR dryline administration and stuff that has to go with this. Our employees love it. And it's like a big differentiation in hiring because you value more. If you value more, if you value more, if you want more stock, you're going to value that more. So it ends up that people just love that. And a lot of companies can compute of us because they have these like fixed bands that you can't go through.

And I think we were just very aggressive about let's just do whatever it takes to hire the best people. We're super aggressive calm. We pay people really well. And the reason is I don't want to be in a situation which is someone that I want to recruit that's really good. He's making more than everyone else in the team and that feels unfair. So I rather like literally just pay people in the 90th percentile of the market or more to get the best people. I was making the point of R&D about being expensive. And it is, and it's true.

But I think it's also what allows us to keep innovating for so long and building. We have four products now. We wouldn't that be possible because we didn't have a lot of talented engineers building things and iterating and stuff like that. So I think just having your entire culture being around, attracting the best people, is doing. And I think a lot of people say that. But there's a lot of actions in the day to day that makes so that's true versus not.

In your seat, obviously, a lot of this starts to become decision. decision-making and recruiting. And as you scale up, your job becomes almost more abstract versus like doing individual contributor work. What have you learned about decision-making specifically? Like, how have you become a better decision-maker that you think might be a portable concept for others that want to follow in that path? Well, again, giving credit to my co-founder here, but he helped his transition to a memo

culture pretty early on. I hate it, I hate it. I hate it. Oh, my gosh. I hate memos. I hate it. Now I like them. But I was like, let's just get in a room and discuss and be verbal and talk about stuff. And people try to boulshund in the company all the time. It's really hard to boulch it in writing. My co-founder does something I think is true, which is writing manualized decision. It actually helps you make better decisions.

It forces you to think in the way. And look, Amazon's probably a pioneer of this. We're just following your footsteps. But you just make better decisions, right? I was talking to like a Fortune 50 CEO the other day about this. And you're saying, wow, but like, don't you lose a thing in which people are in a meeting and you say, hey, what about this? And then they answer you and you have this debate. It's like, you actually want them to think before they answer, you know, in a discussion. You don't want them to like just come to something and reply because if they don't know, it's really uncomfortable to say, I don't know. Let me go find out. They'll just make some shit up versus if they actually need to respond to comment and they can do it async.

They can take a couple hours to find out the right answer. You will get a better answer. I think that the process helps a decision making. What have you learned about convincing people of stuff? I don't want to even call it sales, because sales implies winning a contract from a customer. As a business leader, like you're basically always convincing someone of something all day, every day.

What have you learned about that skill set? Someone told me this phrase earlier on about raising money that I think applies to any kind of sales or convincing, which is you don't really need to convince people that you're right. you just need to convince them that they're right. What do you think is very true for investing? You know, like, all people have this thesis and you fit into the thesis, they love you, you know, because it proves that they were right to their LPs and they can go raise more money.

A lot of times, fundraising is easier to prove that you're in what they believe in than anything else. It's matched those two things. And I think that's true for any kind of convincement of people, you know, like people have a set of preconceived beliefs. If you try to, like, attack their core beliefs, it's not going to work. versus if you understand where they're coming from, how they think about the world, then you show what you're trying to convince in the light that they believe. I think that you have a much higher chance of succeeding. So when we started for Garmin, Pindra was coding and I was quoting to,

and then he's like, Enrique, your code is bad, go do something else. So he said me to do sales. So I had to go do sales. And look, I was a nerd. I never sold people in my life. I only sold my girlfriend at that time that I was a good guy. That's the only sale I've done in my life. And basically, okay, like what I do is, so I started reading like for sales Bible, Seemed like the right place to start. So I read this book, the sales Bible.

And I got in, it's like, look, the main mistake people do is they start just pitching everything. The right thing to do is you should ask questions first. You should understand where they're coming from. You should understand what they're looking for. You should understand everything about them before you see your first work about why you're pitching. And I think that's extremely true for anything. You need to understand how people think and where they're coming from before you can try to convince them of anything. You really need to feed into their view of the world.

If you try to fit into your world, they're just going to move on. It's an incredibly powerful concept of just orientation right away from yourself and towards somebody else's situation. The inverse of this convincing might be difficult conversations to effectively build and move fast. What moments in the business these days make you feel the most alive or the moments in which you're having the most fun? Peter and I, I go-founder, very complementary. I'm not like the big structure guy, you know. I don't like process. I don't like being in process as much. I don't like creating process. It's like not my thing.

Pedro loves process. He loves organized stuff. Pedro's mode of happiness is there's something like super chaotic and he creates some process and it becomes organized. And he loves running the company a lot because he can create these systems and he can think about systems and incentives and stuff like that and he's extremely good about it and he's amazing at it. I like the new stuff.

I like the new businesses, the new things coming on, the new customers, the new rounds, the new, I like new stuff, exciting. structure, more creative, kind of things. I think historically, well, recently, the things I've been liking the most has been, I think, new product initiatives that we're working on. Every time there's like a new, cool, big project, for example, we announced and we applied for a bank charter, I think earlier this year. And it was like your work to get that thing through. I really like going and hiring and hire Bruce, you know, Bruce is amazing. He was a CEO of SBB and like, you know, it was a whole process to hire him and I had a lot of fun getting to know him and hiring him.

And then I was learning about like all these new FDIC regulations and how these things work. How does it fit together writing the application? I think that was all awesome. And I had a lot fun doing it. And there's a few enough things like Doc that we're working on right now. And I had a lot fun with it. It reminds me of Will Thorndyke's book, The Outsiders, where often you had this partnership pair at the top of the chaos person and the order person.

You know, the one opening up doors, the one structuring things was often this really effective one-two punch. Sounds like you guys have built something similar. What has you most excited about the future, generally speaking, not even a Brex question, just in general. Like, you're operating in something that's moving fast. The world's changing quickly. COVID accelerated that. Like, what has you jazzed about the future?

No. I'm really, really excited about the changes that remote work will do to the world. I live in L.A. now. I always want to live in L.A. I could never live in L.A. I thought I was going to spend the rest of my land in San Francisco because that's where the company was. And I'm having my best life. I live in L.A.

I work more than I worked when it was in person. I don't have the commute or pretty focus. I can have dinner and working and stuff. But on the weekends or even sometimes during the day, I go walk my dog in a street and I have a lot of joy doing that. And that wasn't possibly for it for me. And I'm just having like the most amazing life post-remote world. And I'm just wondering, like, someone who runs our team moved to Wyoming.

Again, working a ton from Wyoming. But they always wanted to live their best life in the mountains and how they can. So I'm extremely excited about what remote work is going to change about city, is going to change about the way people live and just the overall happiness of everyone and the overall productivity of everyone as well. Do you have a philosophy of business? Generally speaking, like if you had to start from scratch, would there be a principle or set of principles or philosophy that would drive what you went to do next?

Yeah, I think so. So our biggest inspiration in terms of business and our biggest mentors growing up were the founders of 3G capital. So they own like crab, Times, Burger King, ABI, right? Like all these big businesses, they're all Brazilian, like a trio of Brazilians. And growing up, they were like, both our biggest inspirations because like these Brazilians that made it outside of Brazil. And also our biggest mentors, we were lucky to meet them early on in our career and giving a lot of advice. So I think we learned and got inspired a lot by their way. We just really like this idea. Like we've been called serious entrepreneurs, that's very far from what we want to be. We just want to work on something

for 30 years. Just get one thing, one problem said, and just working for a long, long period of time. And because we really believe in the power of compounding of being able to do something for a long period of time and what's the change and what's the scale you can do if you're something like that, I think this concept of just working on one thing for a long time and just being extremely ambitious. Our main value is dream big, our first value, copied from that. We're not. We're them again, you have big inspirations. If you just work on something for 30 years, a really big dream, I want it to be really something amazing, you can have like a ginormous amount of impact on the world. Can you say one little bit more about this notion of compounding

and working on a single thing through time? What are the key nuances there that make that so interesting and attractive to you? I think Mark Beniof probably said the best that I've seen is people underestimate, overestimate we can do it in a year, but underestimate we can do it a decade. I think that if you get a lot of smart people, like a lot of them, a lot of money, and you put into a problem set for a long period of time, a lot of interesting things are going to be created. Look at a company like Salesforce, right? Look at the impact that they have and the site they have.

Like, I think if it Mark had gave up or had left the company like six, seven years in, you know, professional CEO and that wasn't maybe as excited as he is, it would be really hard to build what they built and to the magnitude that they built. But because you had one person with one vision working on that vision for a long, long, long period of time, very impressive things can be built. And I think it's hard to do that if you don't have the mentality that you're going to do it for a long time because then you don't make long-term investments. Which is a little bit of the Asian problem with hired CEOs is, hey, we are making decisions of Brex today that we think are going to be valuable in 10 years. If I don't think in that horizon, I'm not going to make those

decisions and then the things that take a long time and a lot of effort is what changes the world. Just get Amazon as an example. If they didn't think that building warehouses and the delivery service and all the logistics is very ugly part of the business. Again, engineers just want to do software and let it run, building like warehouses and trucks and all these things or something that's going to take a long time to pay off. But it's what allows you to get one day delivery. It's only possible because they made that choice 10 years ago. Thinking about at some point it was going to be true, if you don't think of that time horizon, you can't feel things that are hard enough to actually change the world.

I'm sure that the centralized account that you put all that effort into is one example of that, of something that's going to pay off for a long time. Is there any other decision, business decision that you've made that's a good example of that tenure thinking? I think decisions that we make around infrastructure, like there's a lot of stuff we say, hey, we could just use a vendor here, we could shortcut here. We just make a decision. We're going to own this.

It's going to be awesome. It's going to take longer. It's going to be more expensive right now, but eventually it's going to pay off. And there's a lot of micro decisions like that that happen in the day-to-day that we end up, especially in the infrastructure side that we end up. The other thing that I think we've done historically and we're going to do even more is investing in our brand. Some investor came and told me and said, hey, Airbnb now it's 93% organic traffic.

I was like, yeah, after like 11 years, I'm investing hundreds of millions in brands. I sure hope so. I think that's something that we're going to invest a lot, not because we think it's going to yield a lot of results this year or next year, but we have like an amazing brand in 10 years. If something as strong as American Express or Visa or Master of Chase, I think that's going to be incredibly valuable. Maybe it's not going to make sense in 21, maybe it's not going to make sense in 22, but eventually we're going to get there.

If I don't think from that time horizon, I'm just saying, the only thing that matters is showing my tax-altese to investors right now, I'm not going to do stuff like this. You mentioned Amazon, one of the most fascinating features of them is they had never made money for a long time. They chose to do things a different way, but they were always very cash flow positive. How do you think about that part of the business? Free cash flow generation. You came from Brazil where getting to profit was key. Talk me through your thinking and orientation on the financial side of the business and what your philosophy is there.

The way Peter and I talk about this is like we have to have our own conviction of where the cash flow we're going to come, right? Like, we totally agree to free gas over shoot, the right metric to optimize. So we have to have our own view of where that's going to come from and we just have to go there. For me, that means two different things. So one is on a unit basis, figuring out what do we think the LTV per customer is and where is it going to come from? And for some segments, we optimize like, look, this segment, we don't think we're going to be able to cross all that much stuff or they're going to pay for that much stuff. so we need to have a pretty good tax all TV today. But some segments, and let's get early stage startups,

they're going to keep growing for a long time. So we can actually spend a lot of money to acquire these customers right now because some of them became scaling AI and now make us a lot of money that pays off for the investment that we made in them over the first couple of years. It wasn't obvious now that was going to be the case and we were going to be able to talk the customer, but it was our own conviction that that was going to be true and we were going to do it. So I think the advice that we guys like having your own conviction

about where the LTV of your customer is going to come from and operating your business in a long-term view. The second point is around SGNA, which is no one cares about SGNA, kind of like how much is the right? Like, should we be burning 50 million in your NgoN, 100 million, 30 million, 200 million, like what's the right number? No one knows. The way we think about is the problem. So I would separate SG&A in three parts like everyone else does. Sales and marketing, R&D, GNA. Sales and marketing, you're catbound. So it goes into the first point I was doing. Absolutely numbers don't matter. The matter is like, hey, what is the KAC-LTP math you're doing on start marketing?

GNA is you have to gain leverage over time. You can have a high GNA, but then over time, GNA divided by revenue, that number needs to gain efficiency. Because otherwise, like, what are you doing? And then you have R&D, which is the hardest one, because it's the biggest one, and you can see it's an investment, you can say it's not an investment. And I think in the R&D, you just need to be very real of yourself, which is, am I producing products that are successful because there are companies that have huge R&Ds, but everything

they launch fails. So that's horrible. You shouldn't be investing in R&D. And there are companies that have huge R&Ds and they launch a lot of successful products. And if that's the case, you should be investing for R&D for a long, long, long period of time. And honestly, almost the more to marryer if you're hiring amazing people and they're producing more products, you should be doing that.

And historically, you'd probably notice more than I do, but I hear investors that companies invests a lot in R&D actually perform a lot. lot better than companies that don't. So I think that's how we think about it. It's like we're very critical of ourselves like, hey, are we launching products that are getting traction or are we just kidding ourselves? And if we are, we should be investing to hiring more to me if or not, we should like take a good look what's going on before we hire more people. It's an incredibly clean way to think about the business. And obviously for you with owning this sort of brain or operating system for B2B financial services like the potential LTV is hard to probably figure out what

that could be because it could be so big, but the conviction is key. This has been so much fun. I've learned a ton about the business. I love the lessons you've learned at a shockingly young age. I've been really interesting to learn from you directly, but also in preparation for the conversation today. I ask everybody the same closing question, which is, what is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you? Georgia, I mentioned in the beginning. He paid for our college when we came to the U.S. a lot of money, $60,000 a year. I'm happy to know that we decided to repay him in Breast stock to his foundation. So he can give a lot more scholarships with that money now.

Amazing. But I think it was super kind. We didn't know how we're going to afford college and play nice discussion. Reminds me of Carlos Brito's story that he told on the show as well. I mean, amazing. It's incredible what they've done, especially just supporting people's education. It's so cool. And love it as a closing anecdote.

Thank you so much for your time. This has been a blast. Really appreciate it. Thank you. This episode of Founders Field Guide was brought to you by Dell Technologies. Dell Technologies and Windows can help you upgrade your business tech with these small business month specials. Save up to 45% on PCs with Windows 10 Pro, plus business stocks, monitors, and more.

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