No Priors Ep. 75 | With Co-Founder and CEO of Brex Pedro Franceschi

(instrumental music) . Hi, listeners, and welcome to No Priors. Today we're talking to Pedro Franceschi, the co-founder and CEO of Brex. Since its inception in 2017, Brex has been building fintech tools that make employee and employer lives easier when tracking and paying expenses and beyond. So it makes sense that they're now implementing AI to make this process, always annoying, even more automated for their enterprise clients. Um, we'll talk about that and the business overall. Welcome, Pedro.

Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Thanks. Yeah.

So just to set context, I think the vast majority of our listeners know, but for any new customers or potential ones, can you tell us what Brex does and sort of what scale it's at today?

Sure. Uh, Brex is, uh, a corporate card and spend management platform, and we help companies make better financial decisions and, uh, push every dollar of spend further. Uh, we serve companies from all sizes, uh, from, you know, two YC, two founders out of YC all the way to, you know, large public companies like DoorDashes of the world, Coinbases of the world, uh, and, and everything in between. Um, we have, you know, tens of thousands of businesses as customers. Uh, one in every three startups uses Brex today. 130 public companies are, are also in Brex. So we have this sort of wide range of customers, which means we're, we're pretty proud to, you know, be able to scale with our customers from inception, uh, all the way to, to really large global scale.

Recently, you, um, and Henrique shifted from co-CEOs for a long time to solo CEO. It's an uncommon arrangement, um, and I think a lot of founders would love to hear any advice you have on both that and then how the, um, how the transition has worked.

Yeah, so I, I think for many years we were the poster child of co-CEO success. Uh, (laughs) so now, now it's changing that maybe, maybe we're, uh, we're, we're, you know, just, uh, uh, cha-changing the, the, the, that pattern, I guess. But, uh, so for us, uh, ho-honestly not a lot has changed in how we actually run the company day to day. So we had this co-CEO structure where Henrique was more external, I was more internal. And the reality is at some point we, we, you know, we've been doing this for really 10 years almost, uh, since our previous company in Brazil, and I think the learnings for us were at some point, you know, we, we massively simplified how we run the company over the past seven months, um, streamlining, you know, layers of management, uh, priorities, fewer decision makers, and, um, you know, there were a few decisions that, you know, there, there was a need for more clarity on how decisions got made. Uh, and, and even though Henrique and I, I think figured it out ourselves super well over the many years as the company scaled and we started to getting le- a bit closer to a different level of maturity as a company, closer to being public and, and, and things like that, uh, it became, um, you know, relatively clear that it would be good to go back to the traditional governance model of CEO and chairman. Uh, and we're happy about the change, but never really changed about how I run the company, uh, how we handle customers, how we talk to investors or, or anything. So it's been mostly a formalization of what's been true for a few years now.