Brex Co-CEO How Being Vertically Integrated Unlocks Global Scale

I think there's a lot of players in our space that are taking like the modular Android approach to building essentially financial technology where you're saying, "Well, we're going to build just this thin software layer on top of all this multitude of vendors." We're sort of more building the Apple version of this, which is like vertically integrated, controlling and owning the entire stack. And with that all I was supposed to do is to have an edge on things where really the financial infrastructure makes a huge difference. [Music] Welcome to Fintech Brain Food interviews with Pedro Francheski, co-founder of Brex. In my opinion, Brex created a category. Life before Brex was not great for founders and growth businesses. The least worst option was Silicon Valley Bank, which would offer a veneer of founder friendliness, but with a horrible user experience and terrible credit limits. Brex turned this on its head with corporate cards that just worked, almost like magic, and they removed the postal guarantee from a founder credit card and made it a business guarantee because it turns out having big name VCs back you is kind of a useful thing. There's money in the bank. It was crazy that this wasn't done before. It is truly hard to understate the revolution this created. Today I see Series A companies with a finance team of one, and maybe two by Series B. Today, there are many competitors in this category, but this is a multi-billion dollar valued juggernaut with a substantial lead in both deposits and float. So they started as a corporate card for startups, but today they're expanding. They're doing a lot more. So I want to get into Can Brex win the race, and if so, how? And a little bit about Pedro. What makes him tick? How are they building an enduring business? Find out in this conversation. Pedro, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining me. How are you doing today? I'm great. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. Thank you so much. How did we get here today? How does Pedro end up on a podcast with some British guy? What's the backstory to you and Brex and meeting and reek and all of that? Yeah, sure. I'm originally from Brazil. I started coding as a kid when I was eight or nine years old. I got into it originally hacking iPhones, jailbreaking them to get them working down in Brazil when they were not sold down there. And I got pretty deep into iOS, jailbreaking, hacking community back in 2008 or '09. I ended up finding this first exploit for jailbreaking the iPhone 3G back in 2009, and got pretty into that community. And ironically, that's actually how I got into payments. So I got into payments in 2011. I went to work for a company in Brazil doing a version of Swear. They had this security issues in their iOS app. And they went really new iOS security back then. So I went to work there to help them improve security. And they're mobile app and then I ended up learning payments for two years inside his payments company, seeing how bad the payment ecosystem was. I met Michael founder, Ricky at the end of 2012. We met through Twitter actually, discussed them with them versus E-Max, like programming tech editors. Wow. We became friends. Which of you, you teamed with them? I switched to VIM. Oh, wow. Okay. So yeah, you know, I already convinced me. Changing religion. It's anybody can do it. It's easy. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So seeking the truth. So then we started our first company together. There was called Pagami in Brazil. And there was basically the best way to explain it is like a stripe of a Brazil. And we scaled that to modern size. You know, the company was profitable. We became the third largest payment processing company in Brazil three and a half years later. We sold that in 2016 to come to the US. So initially we came for college. But we knew that we wanted to build something here where the great companies are built. And then we dropped out of college six months later to do something because we like to work more in study. And then we got into IC with a totally different idea. And then there we saw that no one could get a corporate card. There was this huge issue. And we decided to start building bricks in 2017. And then six or seven years later here we are now. So you pivoted in YC. I didn't realize that that happened when you'd gone in with a different idea. And you kind of came out as almost a completely different company. So talk to me about like what was life like in YC. And what sort of from there today? Yeah, I mean, we got in with a pretty random VR idea. We wanted to build Apple Vision Pro, but without the $20 billion Apple put into it. I always was a little harder. But something like that. They call it hot wet for a reason. That's right. Yeah, the harder startups. So we quickly saw that we knew Fintech much more than we knew anything else. And that the US wasn't really that much better than Brazil. And there's an interesting thing that like I think the sort of quality of a country's financial reels are inversely correlated with how good their economy is. So Brazil, for example, in the 90s had hyperinflation. So we had to move money in real time. So we had real time in Rio since the 90s. Because if you took you more than a day to move money, you lost 10% of the value. Like hyperinflation was like, we had months that were like I think 30% or 40% inflation a month. So the infrastructure really had to keep up with that. And then you come to the US and it's like super stable economy for like hundreds of years. Like the world's reserve currency and all that. And ironically, that meant you know, ACHs took three days to clear. If you didn't get a return, you know, that means success. And we were like sort of puzzled by that. So there was sort of more opportunity than we originally anticipated when we came in from Brazil. There's that bizarre world of being the immigrant. Those that when you experienced that coming into the US, I heard a great story from a Ugandan friend of mine who's like, I couldn't believe it. He's like, oh my God, this is the home of the dollar and I cannot move a dollar. Like what is it? Why is this so broken? It's crazy. So bring me up to today. What's Brexit look like? How many people are you? How big are you? Just give me a feel for some customers, that kind of thing. We're around 1,000 people today as a company, pretty distributed across US, Canada, Brazil. The business evolved from being a corporate card into really being a spend platform for how companies run. And our goal is to manage and help companies make better financial decisions by bringing every dollar into our platform. And we have a variety of products to help them do that. We have cards, we have banking, we have expense management, bill pay. And a very powerful thing of what we're doing is doing all of this on a global level. So what we've learned is 60% of Brexit customers today have at least someone and employ that is not in the US, which we think is really powerful. And the US is a big enough problem, but when you go globally, there's just little tools that do this well. So really the business became that. And we started as this first corporate card for startups and now we serve companies of all sizes and of the likes of door dash, robin hood, war. Warri parker, you know, Flexport, Compass. I've heard of some of those. So that default global thing is something a good friend of mine, Angela Strange has been playing with as a term. You know, Jeaves is kind of a similar company that's just like gone default, default global almost as the first proposition rather than the second one. But somebody said to me recently that San Francisco is the world headquarters for taxis. And it's the world headquarters for like cable video with Netflix and these companies go global, but they go global out of San Francisco. So you get a different kind of scale if you follow them into international markets. It's kind of a unique value proposition. I'm interested to scratch your lead deeper. So talk me through the process of, you know, building the V1 product and, you know, how you thought about like building turnlevers as buy. Like what did that look like? Because there's like an orthodoxy to Y company, which is like right code and talk to customers. Did you follow that? We follow that for sure, but but so different degree than then most people would anticipate. And I already have a lot of fintech nerds listening. So I'll give you some of the inside of it. So the reality is when we started Brex, the challenge wasn't whether people wanted cards. Like people thought about that before. Really, really the challenge was like execution. People literally couldn't issue cards. They didn't have market out. You didn't have stripe issuing. You didn't have any of these technologies under the hood to partner with. So it made his decision very early on to build our entire financial infrastructure from scratch. So when straight to master card and build the whole thing from the ground up directly on their rails. And that was an immense amount of work early on. And frankly, that's what enabled Brex exists in the first place. Because in the past, when we launched in June 2018, we were instantly onboarding customers. You would get a card in real time the same way you would sign a first lock. And yeah, today people yawning at that, but back then people were like cleaning about it. People couldn't believe that that was really possible. And we had to do so much innovation under the hood on the way managed risk. underwrite the way we issue cards, the way we manage limits risk, card provisioning, like card embossing, all these different things at scale. And we literally build our own version of striped issuing our marketer in-house. And then over time, I think our success in many ways, our early success should have created a case for auto companies to do the same thing. And then in many ways, like with striped and marketed, like lower the barrier of entry in our market. And we saw a lot of competitors in everyone issuing cards. And really I think what we can clear to us is like, how would, the ways in which our sort of depth infinitesch for structure would differentiate us, like starters of change. So the first thing we've done as a result is we build a banking product. It's called Brex Business Account. It essentially replaces a bank account. And really what it does is we build an entire banking core from scratch. So literally every single thing you see, every single iteration with ACH wires, like we build that whole thing. And then enable us to then the level of automation that we put into it, do things like what happened in the ICB where, out of a sudden, we have like thousands and thousands of applications. And we're onboarding customers in real time, giving them access to a card and a business account story. And really that was sort of an overnight success, like many years in the banking side. And then on the card side, really what was super interesting to us is seeing how much of, like, we thought we had a leg up in the US. And then a lot of vendors started doing that. But then when we went globally, that was like sort of 10xed. So really today, like Brex is the only corporate card that has a single system that operates in like 30, 40, 50 markets. And the reason is because we went to MasterCard, we built an entire thing there with certified in each market. We have licenses in each of these markets. But the technology behind it is the same. So for our customers, for example, that have a lot of subsidiaries and employees all over the world where they can do say, hey, I want to issue my UK employee a card. And that's like a pound-issued card that behaves essentially as if issued by UK bank, they paid in UK in pounds. And like all of that is handled locally, which is really important for tax compliance, minimizing a fax cost efficiency. So it became this sort of like really, really differentiated global player when you start bringing global spend into the platform because of the financial and future of the manager bill, your latest. As a metaphor, I think about this, but the Adjun story, like Adjun always talks about their single global platform. And as that is their competitive differentiator, there is one platform in the 40, 50 markets that they operate in. And you see them win in enterprise because that gives them a sustainable unit economics advantage in a lot of those markets. But it also allows them to do things with risk-fraud conversion on the back end that you wouldn't otherwise have control of if you were relying on Stripe Radar, or whatever the out of the box solution was. So it can be a meaningful advantage. But is that not also a feature velocity problem? Or is your stack still modern enough that you're not worried about feature velocity and you're kind of playing in a different way? How do you think about that trade-off? So we actually think those are two sides of the same thing. So I think there's a lot of players in our space that are taking the modular Android approach to building essentially financial technology, where you're saying, well, we're going to build just a thin software layer on top of all this multitude of vendors in this space. So if I have to do something globally, I'm going to add a new vendor. If I need to add a new from Pay and Method, I'm going to add a new vendor. And I think what we've learned is that oftentimes, this creates this really, really fragmented customer experience where you don't control entirely what's happening. And we've seen countless examples of this when you start having, now I want to add this in market. I have an employee in this new country. I have to do a reimbursement or I have to pay a bill in an utter currency. How do I manage that? These are all things that are like after thoughts. And really the way we think about it is like the integrated way of thinking is we're sort of more building the Apple version of this, which is like vertically integrated, controlling and owning the entire stack. And what that allows us to do is to have an edge on things where really the financial infrastructure makes a huge difference. And global is wine. I think onboarding is an order. And really what that enables us to do is to build our product and essentially the softer piece of the platform in a much more thoughtful way. And there's a bunch of examples of this. But we created this concept of how do you bring expense management into the card in a single experience. So before you had concur in one hand, MX and the other, there's separate systems. And we said, well, if you build up the intersection, we can control spend before it happens. And enforce your policy, your rules, the moment of the swipe. And now this is like a lot of what we're doing this. But when we started doing this, it was very innovative because we were in the intersection of that. And the same is true now for a global, for example. So we say, hey, like you have employees in all these markets. How do you provision them in separate entities? How do you build them in separate currencies? And how do you do all of that? So the way we build the actual software assumes a lot more degrees of freedom over the infrastructure to build experiences that were not possible otherwise. So in some ways, it makes it easier to build great software when you have the level of control because we're not depending on anyone wanting to serve us or do things a specific way to do, which gives us such a depth in the way we've been. You can continue to innovate on features for that enterprise client and the problem space they have when they're going default global. Like people forget that a company, once they reach a certain scale, might have an entity in 10, 12, 15, 20, 30 markets, Coca-Cola. How many legal entities does a Coca-Cola have? And how many employees of Coca-Cola hate the word conquer? Like, that's just, when you said that word as a former bank employee, a part of me just sort of stopped breaking out in Hives. So, you know, there's a lot of room to run there on, I think, the enterprise side. But how do you think then, like, what does your dashboard look like when it comes to delivering these features of these products? 'Cause now a thousand person company, you know, Dunbar's number, company scales, every 150 people, every metric breaks, like, what does your dashboard and your day job look like? - So we actually changed quite a bit the way around the company over time. And really I think like, the thing that we realized is like, over the last few years, we were very, very inter-onfinancial services early on because we had to build the foundations to enabling all the things that we ended up doing. And then we really see it as a goal, we had this big shift towards here, let's move the software platform, let's just on top of that. And then we can really build things with all the flexibility that we've always wanted because now we own the rails to do it. So, I'm asking about this, I had to build in power, which is a software platform that's just on top of Brex, on top of our own financial rails. And really I think what we've learned there is we really started to think from first principles on how do we think about every kind of spend that you may want to bring into the platform and one of the things that we can take advantage of doing this in real time. And then I'll tell you more on why that matters and how we run the company. But, and then what we realize is that if you sort of zoom out and you think about like, well, finance teams are trying to do, yes, I think a lot of them are trying to venture or spend a lot of them are trying to make sure you're within policy, you're complying. All these things are true, but those are sub-ghosts of a bigger goal, which is like, how do I help my company make better financial decisions? And then what you think about the finance team, a lot of what they think about is, look, we control really the cost lever, right? We control like how much money are we spending in all these things and we control the budget, we control like where people can go and spend. So, we decided to build the sort of primitives of our products in a way that aligns to that thinking. So, one of the things that we build on Brexit that I think became sort of a cornerstone in how we sort of ran product and then a lot of things on top was this idea of like budgets, for example. So, you come into the product, if I go to like a company and I go to like a CMO, for example, and I say, hey, Mr. CMO or Mr. CMO, like, where are you in your budget now? Like, how much have you spent on your budget? And people can tell you because the information is in 10 different systems. And one of the things that we did on Brexit is like, look, you're gonna get this budget versus actually in real time. And that was very powerful in the way making the shifting how people think about managing spend. Because giving your time data allows you, for example, to say, actually, wait a minute. If I have this marketing campaign underperforming and this other one overperforming, I can just shift dollars in real time. Instead of having to wait until the end of the quarter to close and then understand what happened. So, we wanted to build the product philosophy off our software on top of the primitives that we had on our financial services. So, it's a very natural evolution. And then in terms of how we actually run like product in engineering day to day, we're pretty top-down in how we do it. And we have this concept called One Roadmap. And we have like a single roadmap for the entire company. And what we saw in the app, always very app-pole. It's very app. I think a lot of that is not by accident. And what we see a lot of the times is like, We used to see the past like, We know one team working towards five initiatives and we sort of change that to be five team working towards one initiative. And I'm the sort of editor of this roadmap. I'm the sort of author of what we ship and what the cadence looks like. And we tend to make like company affecting progress and sort of customer affecting products. It needs to be released. It's released four times a year. We just had our winter release at the end of January. We made like massive improvements or bill pay product. It's really, really exciting to see how many of us customers are bringing more and more spend into the platform and have the level of visibility. But the way we run is very, is very aligned to a single direction, very few priorities. And then like things laddering up to a broader product vision. We check and tell you more about it. But it's pretty top-down and oriented around like few things that really well in a very functional way across like basically the whole org. There's a little detail there as well. So like full big releases per year, is that correct? Like four major product updates. That sort of gives me like bank avibs. Like that was my whole thing when we ran mainframes was full big releases a year. But the problem was we didn't have the person editing the roadmap. So the fight to get on that roadmap and to get into a release was just chaos. So you need the benevolent dictator, I think, in order for that model to work. It kind of makes way more sense. And the other thing that stuck with me is just tracking budgets in real time. There's a whole thing in large organizations called program management offices or PMO. And this is like an army of people running around with spreadsheets usually from somewhere like Accenture or PWC. Just trying to track budgets versus actuals the whole time on the big projects going on. And software can do this and that's meaningful. That's right. The technology exists and the thing is like it's not that never we know and ever thought of that idea is that no one had the infrastructure and the financial transactions in one place. And most importantly had the control over the payment rails to enforce those things in real time. So it's not just saying, hey, like here's the budget, but it's also how do I prevent you from going over budget, right? If you want to. So really, like I think it's the sort of interesting marriage between a lot of people thought of like great financial software ideas, but they never could implement them because they would lie on banks in the past to get these things done. And what we said is like let's start by replacing the need for the bank. Let's build our own car, let's build our own banking, build our own payments infrastructure. And with that done, you can now put all these interesting software on top, which is really powerful. You can't really start on the software. You have to start on the financial rails. Otherwise you can't lighten the ladder up to something meaningful. So sort of like policy plus payment, everybody gets that when it's expenses, like this is your expense policy. You can only make the payment on the card when it's within policy, budget plus payment, tax plus payment, like legal entity plus payment, like the financial transaction can only be instructed if it's within budget. You know, like there's the broader set of things that might constrain a payment quite wide, but you can sort of be first to all of those and you can continually ship first if you have the infrastructure, which is just kind of powerful. So kind of leads me to the question, which is, when you think about the business today, who's your sweet spot customer? Like who is that ideal customer? Yeah. So the ideal customer is any customer that it has like some level of scale where they can manage their finances alone as just like a founder in a room. Like, you know, we're not serving that sort of single person company, like, you know, that's less of our audience. But one of the things that we feel really proud of is that we can serve customers from, we talk about like public launched like public company. So this idea of like someone just like launched, it's like, see founders in a room, we're great for them. We started on startups, right? And the thing that was interesting about Brexit is our own customers like scaled. So you had a customer who was like two people and one example that I like is like Alex Wang from scale AI. We went to literally deliver physical parts to Alex and now he's like, you know, a $1,000 company has like, I think almost a thousand employees. He's like at a forefront of AI now. And with, you know, LM training and things like that, he became an enterprise customer himself. So he has like a CFO. He has like global employees. He said global needs. So our own customers pooled as a market in many ways. And really what that meant is we would naturally progress through these all these life cycles of a company. And we sort of were building on top of that complexity to support these larger, more sophisticated use cases. So when I would say the majority of customers that find the most value out of Brexit are probably say like any company between zero and, you know, 10,000 employees, we can serve them pretty well today. And we have segmentation. We serve a lot of them in different ways. But we started with startups and then really when I'm working obviously the majority of the customers is like probably in the, you know, 500 to 1000 employee range, I would say. That's your current sweet spot, but you've grown up with them. And I wonder on the risks side, do you see it as a risk that like you age out with that generation? I mean, that's a pretty great class to be fair to be aging with like the probably one of the all time great VC classes in terms of market cap and valuation. But do you, do you see the need to always purchasing the bottom of the market or do you see like different directions for you? I think the reality is there's more customer size. I think like if a company is not planning to scale a typically a dawn, final lot of value in Brex because a lot of the things that we build like they, they inherently make more sense when you have complexity, right? When you have more employees, more spend, more different things going through the platform. And we do a lot of work trying to simplify it as much as we can. But the reality is like startups are very interesting and that's like our sweet spot in the sort of smaller customers, smaller employee count because they grow, right? And they need a solution to skills of them and they have more complexity from early days. They have like employees all over the world sometimes, right? They have, they're distributed. They're not just like, you know, two people inside a single location, like a restaurant or something like that. And they might have $5 million to manage instead of cash flow. Exactly. They have tragedies, right? And they have like, it's just a different reality than a traditional small business. So our sweet spot is customers that scale. Yeah. Okay. That's a different take on it. It's not like how big the company is. It's how big the company can be and intent to be that that kind of defines it. So last point in this section really is like, what's the non-obvious insight that you've learned as you've built this infrastructure? Like if you were to talk to Pedro in 2017, what would you tell that guy that's going to be like, holy crap, that's the thing. I guess it was just a lot of work and a lot of work that no one saw. And the reality is a lot of people asked us later on, they were like, well, but like, now there's all these different infrastructures that you can use. Why don't you switch to them? And the reality is, to be at the forefront, we always had to push the envelope on what was possible in the rails. Right? Always. So like, for example, global, I think now is an example, like, effects management is another example, banking was another example. Right? So we always had to have really strong financial services orientation to build great software. Because that's what enables us to really be at the edge of what a software could do is we had to have more control over that. You know, stay true to your convictions in many ways. You know, I think like a lot of the time people try to like, just from building the rails the way we did. And then I think later on as we scaled, I think probably the most interesting thing is like, how much we sort of she's the parent I am of what credit cards can do. And I think we will ask on to that for a long time and it's been great. And I think, you know, for better, for worse, people still associate Brexit corporate cards, but would be like so much more than cars today. And that gets lost in translations sometimes. But obviously it's what we're known for. And we're thrilled. It's the biggest product, of course, it's the one that grows the fastest. But it's an interesting place to be where you do so much more. You've done so much changing the concept of what happened to your heads about the first one that all the rest of us was like, you know, is less relevant in some way. I completely get it. Like, your revenues might come from somewhere else entirely. The unit economics might be really advantage somewhere else, but you'll always be that company that did that thing, you know, to a lot of people, Miley Cyrus, we'll always be Hannah Montana. It's just like there are some things that just label a category. I completely, completely get that. When you mention foreign exchange, that's a really interesting one as well. Like, I remember going to a conference with corporate treasurers of like, you know, the great and the good, the Pepsi Co's and, you know, these global, global companies. And somebody described the job of treasury management at that scale as being managing cash flow and managing risk. So how can I be more cash efficient? And how can I manage risks? One of those is FX risk. One of those is supply chain risk. One of, like, there's a whole bunch of things that you worry about at scale that meaningfully alter this quarter's results in a way that you do not worry about as a very young company. And you need those products and those features. And I always looked at Brexit sort of backing into being a global transaction bank. So I came from cash management and global transaction banking. And it feels very familiar to that world almost at some point. But speaking of, you know, just winding the clock back slightly in a bit of a segue here. I want to talk about life in Q1 of last year, 2023, Silicon Valley bank. That's all hidden the headlines. Take me inside the Brexit office. Take me inside your world when the news hits that SVB's down that there's a run on the bank that all of this is going on. What was that like? Yeah. definitely one of the most memorable moments of my career and probably most people that were Brex would probably say the same thing. First, we didn't know it would happen. We had, we monitored all of our banking partners like balance sheets and financial health and we, there were some evidence that things were interesting from a liquidity perspective and just saw the perceived perspective at S&B earlier on, like maybe like six months of behind, when interest rates had started to rise. But you know, they've been so big that I think no one really anticipated that. And you know, inside Brex, we had two things happening that were really interesting and one of the insights that to me became clear in hindsight is like history is always told from the standpoint of like winning and playing offense. But really inside a company, we're very divided in offense and defense. So yes, in some ways, it was really, really unique moment to acquire a lot of customers and grow the business materially and you know, service customers better than the previous solution. But in a different vein, it was also a very risky and fragile moment in the financial services industry. And what you have to remember is these banks and these financial services are all interconnected. So, you know, we didn't know, like it was the first of many banks to fail and then you know, you had first your public after. We didn't, you know, all of our capital markets partners were calling us and saying, hey, what's going on? And we had, you know, like hundreds of millions of dollars of exposure to S&B through receivables. We didn't have cash from Brex itself there. We were very conservative in that side and kept a lot of it away. But the reality is like, we had a fair amount of exposure. And the question is, all these S&B customers that can access their bank accounts, they have like Brex cards with like limits and that's the only way they can spend. So how you manage that risk also was unclear. And we did a lot of things like gift customers as much leave as we could while making sure regulators and banking partners in our sales were a comfortable level of the risk that we're taking because we needed to be financially healthy as that happened. And it was an interesting moment because we did so much great work playing defense as well internally and managing risk. And that wasn't obviously no one noticed it. And people heard it's like, you know, to be honest, it's like thousands of customers in 36 hours. Like obviously, that was great. Don't get me wrong. But the reality is at the end, we saw how powerful it was to do both at the same time. Do you know what's crazy? Risk management never gets the applause. Yeah, I always describe that job as being a bit like a secret agent. Like if they do their job super well, nobody notices and they're just anonymous. And that's a shout out to everybody that works in those functions because you don't know who's solvent. You don't know what receivables are going to come through. And yet at the same time, you're torn about wanting to support your customer. So I'm curious how you reflect now more broadly on the partner bank ecosystem because in the US in particular, you are relying on underlying banks for these deposits to exist. I think it's now become normal for companies like yourselves to partner with sweep networks and to make sure that that's adequately risk managed. But how do you think about that partner banking system? There's a lot of regulatory pressure on partner banking ecosystem. What are your reflections on that? Yeah, 100%. And one of the things that we take, great pride of Brexit is on risk management and compliance. And I think especially a lot of new players in our space, I think they lose sight that at the end of the day, yes, they're software, yes, all that school. But you're still doing financial services, you're shooting landing, you're shooting KYC, you're shooting underwriting, shooting on boarding. And those things are very serious and very complicated. And there's a lot of things that can go wrong. One of the things that we spend a lot of time is on credit quality and credit performance. We had three or four X better performance than AMX historically, which is like, thanks to the technology and the way we build the credit systems and the way we have real time data to underwrite. So that's something that I think we felt pretty proud of. And the way we always manage our banking relationships and partners is very, very, very tight to the hip, very close to them. And the reality is they are as big of a part of the customer experience as Brexit self because they essentially are the ones that give us the power to play. And we tend to take a lot of the overhead ourselves because we probably have an easier time in building technology. So we say, how can we comply to whatever you have to comply and go the extra mile to give you the systems to monitor us? So we tend to be very proactive in the way we handle them. Just so we're sort of building, assuming the requirements that they have from their regulators is something that we're thinking about as well. So it's very collaborative. We were very fortunate to have great banking partners, Amigurm Bank, Colin Bank, and many others that have partnered with us over the course of the comedy history. So that for sure has been a big pleasant something that I think we did right, like choosing the right partners. But I think there's no secret. It's just like really aligning the incentives, thinking about the world and the challenges through their eyes. And then thinking about like the customer experience and the things that they want to go through our eyes. And to gather those two things like help us help you be more aligned and do things in a better way for customers. I like that default approach of imagine if I had all of the obligations the bank did and all of the risk they did. So I'm putting myself in exactly their position. But I have my ability to build tech, not theirs. So what would this look like if we were one company? And that's the nature of partnership, which has frankly not always been the case when there's been sort of a partner bank and then an intermediary and then a FinTech company. And things got a little bit checkbox process here for a little while. And we can see that kind of coming back the other way. But speaking of risk, like what would you say are the risks you worry about? What are the material risks? Could you lose your edge? Could you get a bit long in the tooth? Age comes to all of us. I know I'm about to turn 40. So what do you think your risks are? I think the question always is, you know, a forest there's all the sort of financial services risks. Which I think we're then a fairly good job at managing. But really I think the biggest risk is like a lot of it is like we want to push the envelope for how companies manage money. We want to be at the bleeding edge and help them with the tools and systems. And we call the product empowered not by accident because we want them to empower everyone in the company to make better financial decisions. And I think the biggest risk is just like how can we execute on that vision that is like incredibly bold. It's bigger than cards, bigger than financial services is really about almost culturally how company thinks about money. And what we see is as they start getting into the brex mindset of operating the business and thinking about money. A lot of things start changing in the way people feel empowered to make financial decisions in the way like cost savings become like really apparent because we have data that just shows what's waste and what's not. You start to see global employees playing field as employees in the US. So I think you see a lot of that happening. So I think the biggest edge is the biggest risk is just like execution. Like can we can we sort of live to the size of our ambitions in many ways. And there's a lot of complexity because the reality is no one has really done this before. No one has really said his idea of saying we want to replace all the payments and bank and essentially the role the banks traditionally played on the payment side. And we want to replace the software as well at the same time and do this on global scale. So the reality is when you put these three things together the sheer size of it is daunting. And the other thing I'll say is I think generational companies like what we're trying to do they take decades to build. So a lot of it is like not like how we win the next six months or next year. It's how we win in fullness of time. So we made a lot of decisions in a very deliberate way that are not optimizing for like 2024. They're optimizing for like us five years. So now because I want to be here running the company. You know, we're going to be here doing the same things. And you know, I think a lot of the focus that we had on like long term profitability, our cost structure and just like configuring the entire business model to become the questionable winner in like spend management in card space and in the pace phase in a more global level. They're not going to pay off this year. You're going to see some things next year. But really I think we're thinking about it in a much longer time horizon than I think harder players. And I think when you put together the realities of like how do you win in a time span of decades, I think there's just a lot of decisions become different. And that's where it's on. Well, that's sort of like the fount of mantra really is you're trying to build something sustainable. You're not necessarily thinking next quarter, which is always an advantage you can have. And it is a different approach. It's the more Apple like approach, which is when they launch a V one of everything that people go, wow, that's expensive and it doesn't even do the dishes. And then 10 years later, it's the dominant product. So it is a mindset that has been proven to work. Speaking of like approaches to work and talent more broadly, a lot of my audiences, an operating financial services, Fintech's had a hard time. There's been a lot of layoffs. Frankly, I think there's been a lot of things where VC firms, you know, haven't been as popular. You know, the FinTech team hasn't been the most popular team. The AI team was, should somebody still come to work in a FinTech company? And why should they stick around? Like what motivates you? What motivates the team? Like, why do you get excited? I think the thing with FinTech is there were a lot of tourists in the past like a few years, especially in the zero interest rate period. And I think the reality is, if you think about Brexit, like we're still less than 1% of the US market. And yes, you know, the company has grown a lot. And since we launched, thankfully to a lot of customers, you know, putting your trust on us to run their business on Brexit. But the reality is we're still so small. And really like the competition is the big banks, it's AMX, it's concur. Like these are the players that really are still in the space. And I think the thing about FinTech that to me is really intriguing is, when you get into the way people make financial decisions, it's almost like the ethos of like being a great operator is at the end of the day, you're trying to make great capital decisions, try to make great investment decisions, they're trying to make sure you're putting resources in the right places. And I think one of the things that really believe in a Brexit is like, how do you help companies break trade-offs? Like how do you help them like do more or less? Right? It's not just less. When I help you do more, right? And that idea, I think, is really powerful. And I think the closer you are to how money moves and how they can make decisions, I think the ability of influencing outcomes is like big. And I think especially when you're aligned with financing, like ultimate goals, I want people to make better financial decisions as a business. I think that has a more profound meaning. I think it's not just about like, spend management can be cost savings, right? It can be a tool that helps you go, go, you know, save a few dollars in SaaS or a few dollars in Teenie. Like that, you sure, you can use the product for that and we do that really well. But I think the more fundamental truth is like being a well-run company requires you systems to make great decisions and that those are the things that we want to build. So I think FITEC just allows you to have a really great platform to change how money moves and how money is spending in a company. And I think that can really influence outcomes. In a more mature way than you wouldn't, you know, like a traditional SaaS or something like that, that maybe you're just operating a very limited scope of what dictates the success of a company. You've mentioned first principles, you've mentioned primitives and now you've sort of hinted out systems thinking, which is looking for points of leverage in a system. And one of the biggest leverage points is changing how the financial system works because once you've changed how money moves, you can change just about anything because you need money and capital to do just about anything. You want to build a school, you want to prevent human trafficking. Generally, whatever it is a person cares about, I can link money back to it. And if I can link money back to it, I can link how changing the financial system and getting closer to the metal would make a meaningful impact for it. So it's an insight I absolutely agree with. And so I want to then look forward. I mean, you sort of alluded to this ever so slightly in terms of your thinking in decades. But what are your priorities over the next sort of 12 months, three years, five years? Like if I was to say, here are the things that you're jumping up and down about and really focusing on for the next four courses of your releases, what would that kind of look like? I think there's a few themes that are very top of mind for us. One is how do we think about bringing more and more spending to the Brax platform? And one thing that's powerful is, yes, of course, when we bring it all together, it's unquestionably unbeatable compared to having point solutions. But we also want to make each individual solution extremely competitive on their own. So we want to make our card product individually competitive. We want to make our banking product, our build-up product, our travel product, which we build a lot of depth in travel over the past 18 months. So I think that's like a theme. How do we build a lot of depth into each one of our offerings? Second theme I think is what starts to matter when you bring all the spend into one place? So things like the things under the hood, the financiers only care about. Like how do you budget? How do you close your books? How do you move money globally? This thing is a little bit of layer below the spend decision and more into the life cycle of expenses. You think about budget accounting. All these scenes are not things people are worried about are thinking. But those are main reasons why a lot of customers choose Brax because we do it really well. And we want to continue saying ahead of that. And probably the third theme, which is a little bit more thematic is a little bit more broad but still very important to us, is how do we do this in a sustainable way that we can endure for a long time in this market? And markets are not the easiest right now. They've been in 2021. And we made a lot of really deliberate decisions to keep our fortress balance sheet in a really solid place. Make sure cost-struction, path to profitability are really clear. We don't need to raise any more money. We build a path to the actual positive with the money we have raised. We should be very proud of. So really I think it's like how do you endure? So that in fullness of time you become the default solution because one of the things that I really believe in is at the end of the day, compounding is the strongest force in the universe. So we need to do things that compound. And I think we are doing that in the product side in the way we grow and we were putting this message out there in the market. But ultimately, it only matters if you can continue to compound. So what are the things that we need to do internally and how we orient ourselves into the level of rigor that we bring in every day? We have this sort of, this is operating model about road maps and all the things that I talked about. We call it Brextree.no internally. And how do we bring that level of rigor, discipline, great financial mate decision internally into an almost like you sort of eat your own dog food. You know, they're very things we're selling to customers. We have to become. So like if we're saying, hey, you can do more of less. You can break trade offs. You need to make better for your decisions. We need to be the sort of a poster child of that internally. So it's something that we have a lot of proud of and being the kind of company that we wanted to support. And we are our own customer in many ways. You have to experience the pain of your client to really empathize with it. And you have to be forced into those trade offs. At Sardin, my CEO, Soups always talks about like he'd rather avoid hiring for as long as possible because I want you to feel pain before and try and solve that problem another way before you hire because it is that's classic Silicon Valley ethos. And it creates the I think he uses the term a lot. Necessity is the mother of invention for a reason. And then I'm totally with that. Final question just to kind of round us out. Is there anything I didn't ask that you kind of wish I had that you think is important that people should know and anything else you want to close on? I think the main thing is we're still so early in this market. Like I can't stress enough. I thought this is my team but Brexit, all the new entrants in the space of B2B, Fintech, spend the management. We're still 1% of the way. And the battle is not going to be decided in the next like two years. It's going to be decided in the next 10. So a lot of the decisions that we make are about how do you endure in phone as of time. And you know, you look at like amazing companies out there. You look at Apple, you look at Meta, you look at Amazon. It's 20 year journey. And that's what we want to set ourselves up for. We spend a lot of time thinking about that. Like how do you endure and how do you thrive and become this sort of unquestionable winner in this space. But not next year in a longer time frame. And a long term thinking is something that we've learned I think over the past few years, especially as we've been through this year interest rate periods and you start to think about, okay, what does this company ultimately become? And I think that just the potential of what we're doing is being an financial services is that they said that changing company culture. Like how it makes spend decisions across the board and any resource allocation decision. I think it's a very profound goal that ultimately means companies better run and you know, more, more value delivered society, you know, more impact. Companies that just literally do more, right? And get quality to achieving their own missions. You've found a tipping point in the system and you're going to push all to kind of make that leverage work. I respect that Pedro Pedro. Thank you so much for joining me. If people are curious about you, what bricks, where do they go to find out more? Bracelet.com. We have everything there. Alrighty. And thank you for listening, FinTechNerd. If you like this episode, please remember to tell your friends and leave a review on Apple podcasts. So wherever you get your podcasts, it helps others find the show. You can find me on my blog at FinTechBrainFood.com or you can find me at S.Y. Taylor on just about every platform because there's so many of them these days. I'm even on Forecaster. I'm on Blue Sky. Wherever you want to be, you'll find me. Thank you so much. Bye for now.