20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

The Twenty Minute VC

Finance, Venturecapital, Tech News, News, Siliconvalley, Technology, Investing, Startups, Business

4.4 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 17 July 2024

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Pedro Franceschi is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Brex, the AI-powered spend platform with tens of thousands of customers, including DoorDash, Coinbase, Robinhood and Roblox. Pedro has raised over $1.2BN for the company from the likes of Greenoaks, Ribbit, DST, Bond and YC. The latest reported valuation was $12.3BN. Before Brex, Pedro was the first person to “jailbreak” the iPhone 3G in Brazil and co-founded payments company Pagar.me with Dubugras when he was 15. In three years, Pedro scaled it to over 100 people and US$1.5 billion in transactions processed.

In Today's Episode with Pedro Franceschi We Discuss:

1. The Challenge is in Your Own Head:

Why does Pedro believe all founders underestimate their own mental health?
When was Pedro most anxious/depressed in the Brex journey? Why?
What have been the single biggest needle movers for increasing his own mental health?
How does Pedro advise other founders struggling with their own mental health?

2. From a 13-Year-Old Hacker in Brazil to Billionaire in LA:

How did Pedro come to make $200K on the internet when he was just 12?
Does Pedro agree that the best founders always started entrepreneurial pursuits young?
How does Pedro reflect on his own relationship to money today? How has it changed?
Pedro has famously taken large secondaries, how did that impact his mindset?
How does Pedro advise other founders and VCs when it comes to secondaries?

3. The Importance of the Idea: What Everyone Misunderstands:

What does Pedro mean when he says everyone does not appreciate enough how important the idea selection process is? How does he advise founders entering this process?
Why does Pedro believe it is not that easy for founder to just pivot to a new idea?
How did YC almost miss out on investing in Brex, now a $12BN company, due to the original idea?

4. Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins:

How does Pedro feel when I say, "Ramp have gotten ahead on marketing and visibility"?
Why does Pedro believe that "Ramp is a marketing company"? What does he mean when he says "great products will win over time"?
Why does Pedro fundamentally disagree with Ramp's positioning of the best companies focus on saving and their giving away their software for free?
How does this market play out over time? Winner take all or gains split across several?

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	If I were to write a book about how to build a company, there'll be two parts. Part one takes six
0:04.4	months. Part two takes 10 years. 50% importance of each. And the part one is just finding what you're
0:09.6	going to do and who are going to do it with. And I think the initial conditions are like highly
0:15.6	underestimated. There's this belief that I can just pivot my way around into an idea that works.
0:20.5	It's really hard to pivot away into something else.
0:23.6	And I think people just don't anticipate how much of just finding a good idea is still really damn important.
0:28.6	Then the other 50%, the 10-year journey of like leveraging those like tailwinds.
0:32.6	This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and today we welcome Pedro Franceschi, co-founder and
0:38.0	CEO at Brex, the AI-powered spend platform that has raised $1.23 billion with the latest
0:44.7	reported valuation at $12.3 billion. But to me, that's not what's so cool about Pedro. The man
0:51.8	is the epitome of a child prodigy. Check this out. Before Brex,
0:56.8	Pedro was the first person to jailbreak the iPhone 3G in Brazil when he was like 13 or 14 years
1:03.3	old. And then he co-founded the payments company, Pagormi, with Henrique, his Brex co-founder,
1:09.5	when he was just 15. And in just three years, Pedro scaled Pagormi with Henrique, his Brex co-founder, when he was just 15. And in just three years, Pedro scaled Pagami to over 100 people and over $1.5 billion in transactions processed. Incredible.
1:21.6	But before we dive in today, all of you listening use tons of software every day. Sometimes it fills us with rage.
1:28.3	You can't figure something out.
1:29.3	The chatbot in the bottom right is useless.
1:31.3	You keep getting bombarded with these useless pop-ups.
1:34.3	And for those of you who build products, no one wants their product to feel like this.
1:38.3	Thankfully, a company exists to help users without annoying them.
1:41.3	Command bar.
1:42.3	It does a couple of very helpful things.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Twenty Minute VC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Twenty Minute VC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.