He Hacked Finance And Is Now Building An AI CEO - EP 63 Pedro Franceschi

Today's guest is a coding and entrepreneurial prodigy. He is Pedro Franceschi, the CEO and co-founder of Brex. The headlines on his life story are quite remarkable. He grew up in Brazil, taught himself to code as a eight or nine year old. By the time he was a teenager, he was hacking the iPhone. He was getting legal notices from Apple asking him to stop hacking the iPhone. He was starting a number of businesses where he made hundreds of thousands of dollars while all the rest of his compatriots were on the beach in Rio de Janeiro or playing soccer, Pedro was coding away, creating these companies. He had some very deep sadness in his childhood. His father got cancer and passed away when Pedro was just eight. That left his mother to raise Pedro and his sibling as a single mother. She had some unconventional approaches to raising Pedro, which we get into in the show. Obviously we get into Brex, which has been this just superstar of modern financial tech. They were just acquired by Capital One for $5.15 billion. We speak about this on the episode. When we talk about, Pedro is really open about the ups and downs running this business. His own personal ups and downs struggles with mental health. He writes about these things. He talks about them in the show, just these 29 years old. This dude has lived quite a juggernaut of a life so far. These days, he's using AI agents in some what I find imaginative and comical and inspirational ways. He's got a team of AI agents running his life. We speak about all that. I should note, Brex is the flagship sponsor of this podcast at our video series. As such, we are deeply, journalistically, conflicted in this episode nonetheless. I think it is a good listen and he has a fascinating story to tell. This is Ashley Vance, your listening to the Core Memory Podcast and off we go. Pedro, thank you so much for coming in. Thanks for having me. You are your royalty in these parts. You guys have been such amazing supporters of everything. Oh, thank you. We've been doing so. Very glad to help. We're big fans. I feel extra pressure. Dude, it is what you, at the end of last year, you got married. You just were acquired for $5.1 billion and now you're on the Core Memory Podcast. It's all happening. It's all happening. It's really all happening. I wanted to, for people to get to know you a little bit, I mean, look, I cover all kinds of inventors, startup founders, and some stories I see repeating a little bit. There's echoes of that in some of your biography. I'm just going to read off a little list here for people super quick and then dive into a couple of these things. But if you throw your name into Claude or chat GBT and ask for a quick ground or it's like, ages 8 to 9 teaches himself to code, entirely via Google. No formal training. Age 11 begins jail breaking, iPhones and iPods. Age 12 starts creating apps. You sell it apps to friends at school. Age 15 to 16. Well, then this is kind of when you start your journey heading towards Brex one day. You can meet a friend and a friend and a friend and a friend and a friend and a friend. So, some of this is familiar. Reminding me a lot of George Hots who I've written about. Oh, no way. Yeah. It's like this teenage hacker. He was supposed to be IRC buddy back in the day. He was getting into the PlayStation. But even among these people I've covered quite exceptional, especially running money-making businesses as a kid. There's some of this in the things that I read. But tell me, were you just always, you hit upon a computer and it just makes sense to you? Yeah. So, I think the biggest luck of my life was I found out what I loved doing when I was 8 or 9. Most people don't have that luck. But I did. And I grew up in Brazil. Growing up, I lost my dad when I was 8. And he was a big nerd and he spent a lot of time in the computer. We had a computer at home which was relatively rare back in Brazil. And somehow was something that was around my life since the beginning. And I would say when I was 8 or 9, I just had this very deep curiosity to understand how the computer worked. And then I opened it up one day and I thought there wasn't anything interesting inside the computer. So I thought, well, there's something else going on here that makes this actually be so magical and so amazing. And I realized it was software. And then as a kid in Brazil, I wasn't really exposed to software engineering in any capacity. But the internet existed and the internet is this amazing thing that allowed people like me to learn something that I would never be able to learn otherwise. So I started googling how to code and started learning C and C++ back when I was 9. And learning that in English at the same time made it a little bit more challenging. C is in a particularly friendly language, but it's all the resources that I found back then in I guess 2004 or 5. So that was sort of the backdrop of how I started coding. And what I really found remarkable about computers was you just had this ability of taking whatever you wanted with very little sort of permission or need to go do something. And then around the time it was 12, I became a little bit of a better engineer and was around the time that Apple launched the iPhone. And if you remember back in 2008 or '09, the iPhone only worked at VACNC here in the US. So there was this whole thing of when you wanted to use the iPhone abroad, you had to jail break it to get it working in other countries. So it jailed break it and then do the carrier unlock. The jail breaking was the hardest part. So I was using a lot of the tools that existed online to make that happen. And then a new iPhone came out, the iPhone 3G, I ended up finding a way to jail break it. That was one of the first ones back then in 2009. And I got sort of known in this like iPhone jail breaking community. And then weirdly enough, that's actually how I got, I started working. So I used to, you know, a reporter in Brazil realized that there was this kid doing, you know, doing jail breaking things online because of celebrity. I guess I wasn't really known back then, but because I used to just publish things online with my handle, which was pH. My name is Pedro Henrique, that's why pH like the chemistry pH. And somehow this reporter realized that was Brazilian. I think it was because of my IP address in this IRC form. And he reached out and said, hey, there's a Brazilian involvement. It's like iPhone jail breaking community. And then he asked, how old are you? I want to know more about you. And in my head, I thought, well, if I tell people I'm 12, they're not going to take me seriously. So I tell people I was 14. And in my head, it made a huge difference. And then right around the time that was sort of in the Brazilian press and a company in Brazil that was building mobile apps reached out to me. And I ended up going to work there right around the time I was 12, 11 or 12. And at first, I told my mom, hey, this company wants to hire me. And she said, no way, what are you talking about? You're 12, no freaking way. But then I convinced her to come interview with me. So she went there. And I started working there part time. And it was great because it was the first time that I actually met professional software engineers. What does it look like to really be sort of role class? And my first boss, Ben Jackson, was fantastic. He worked in New York Times after Boone and their mobile app. And he went to Penn. So it was just like a US grade software engineering experience, which I don't think was very formative. And then right around the time I was 14, I did two things. It sort of got me in trouble. One is I ended up reverse engineering series to make it work in Portuguese and terrible. New ones in Apple were not very happy with me. And the second was, I built this app for the iPad called PuesArt, which you could run apps on Windows, the same way you can now on iPad, but that was in 2012. So 13 years ago. And that was really fun. And I put this online and I used to charge 10 bucks per download and in CD Store back then for this sort of parallel app store. And I made the 300k when I was 14. So I had to explain to my mom what that money was about. I thought I was doing something online, but anyway, so I did all that. And then, I paused. Yeah, go for it. Because I write about some of this and I just had a couple questions along these lines. I mean, your mom goes to your first job interview with you. You said, I think, you're going to be a great job. you were 12 for that one. What does that look like? You both walk into the office together? Yeah. So it's funny because I think your parents make a few decisions that they may not be aware at the moment, but they drastically changed the course of your life. And I remember around that time there were all these articles that came out that Bill Gates' daughter could only spend 45 minutes staying in the computer. And then my mom looked at that and here was her son spending 14 hours a day in the computer. And Bill Gates knew a thing or two about computer. So who am I to allow that? And I think she was very fortunate to see what I was doing with a little bit of a bigger aperture and see that I wasn't like playing games. I was actually building something productive that people got value from. And that sense of being a builder, which is really the biggest look of my life, realizing that I loved to build things, was something that I think she saw the impact they had on me and other people that used the things I built. And I think that unlocked her to allow me to not only spend a lot of time in the computer, which I needed, but also the same time just really open to these experiences of going in and working even though it was very counterintuitive. And my family and extended family friends were all asking her you know, this kid is 12, why is he working? And she said you don't understand he wants to. And thankfully she did it because if she had it, I think the course of my life would have been very different. What's that like you going for this job interview together? And so what? The two of you were just sitting on one side of the table? Yeah. So we went to have lunch with the two founders of that company. And then it was the same. And the Brazilian or one of them is American, De Adres, Brazilian. The American one went to Brazil. He went to Brazil for Carnival one year and never left. I say four years. Not he's in the United States in New York now, but it was really funny just to see like a professional soft engineering in Brazil in Rio. And then we went for this lunch. And I was just talking to them technically about the things I was building and I'm almost like, I have no idea what's happening, but sounds like they are excited. So I guess it's a good sign. And then at the end, they were like, look, we think we think he's good. We'd like to work with him. And she said, I have only one thing to say. He's 12 years old. So if something happens to him, I'm going to kill you. And then they were like, okay, understood. So she was very protective, but in a way, obviously it was a very different environment. It was this company where, I guess the second youngest person was probably like 26. And then I was 12. So I don't know if I would have the courage to let my son do that, but she did thankfully and things worked out. Yeah, okay. That was kind of like how I pictured it in my head a little bit. I mean, look, lots of lots of young kids code. And this is a difficult question because I'm asking you to tell me how awesome you are in some ways. But I'm more curious how your brain works because I get, yeah, I've met so many people. This is a common story. They start coaching at a young age. But I mean, what you're doing it is it is again, it reminds me of hots just because it's on the exceptional side. How does what are you particularly good at when it comes to coding? Why were you standing out at that age? I think it was just this, you know, program has this essay about the, you know, the bus ticket theory of genius about these uninteresting obsessions that when you multiply over the course of one's life, you end up in a pretty interesting place. And to me, I just had this deep curiosity to get computers to do things that they were not designed or supposed to do. And almost sort of proving that it could it could it could happen from a technical standpoint. So that's probably the backdrop. And I would say the biggest benefit that I had having started that early is because I feel that when you are 12 or 14 or you're very young, the creative energy that flows through you when you're building something is almost like the purist kind because there is no other reason besides love for the game. Right? There's no other reason. Like I didn't need to make money. Thankfully, my, you know, my, I grew up in a middle class family in Brazil. So I, you know, I was lucky to not have to, you know, I wasn't wealthy growing up, but I been, it wasn't, it wasn't for the money that I was making. It was because I was just very deeply interested in the craft itself. So, so that's me has always been the thing and having this sort of a respect for the creative energy that comes when you have an idea and saying, how do I manifest this thing into happening? And I remember when I built this app Quasar and I was 14 and it was actually a very, very complex problem from a technical standpoint. You had to, you know, make the iPad become, you know, basically instead of being single processor rendering the UI, you had to make multiple processes, Henry the UI. So you needed to build a scheduler to coordinate different things rendering at the same time on the screen, which was technically complex. And that to me was, I just had a sense that it was possible and, and, and when you have this sort of deep connection to this thing you want to see in the world, I think the way you show up and, and, and the hours and the time and the energy, these things all go away and you sort of a, surrender yourself to that process in a weird way. And, and I think so much of my, my journey as a builder was how do you connect to that energy? And it's funny because I was telling my team that, you know, now, if I and a lot of the things that we're building and being much more hands on as an engineer, in a world of, you know, a company of like 1,300 people and a much bigger scale, weirdly enough connects me back to that very same energy that I started with. And, and coming from a very pure standpoint. So I think that's been the biggest driver for me. And, and of course, you know, a lot of curiosity and, and, and energy and time, but it came from a very sort of creative place versus from like a, like a, like a, like a work in the sort of traditional sense of I mean, to do this and make money and there's parts that are good parts that are not good. No, it was all great. It was all really fun. And so you're, you're in a Rio, I mean, all your peers are running around playing soccer, having a good time going to the beach. And you're like locked in your house, like in a, yeah, like in your room or exactly what did it look like? I mean, what kind of puzzle do you have? I mean, I had a, I, the time I made enough money, I bought myself an iMac. So it was me and my Mac and just like hours and hours and hours of like coding on you know, VAM or text mate back then was a text editor we used to use. And a lot of lots of IRC channels, that's how I met a geohotter originally. And, and you know, a lot of the folks involved in CEDIA and the original geobrit community, mobile substrate. There were a lot of different sort of work groups back then, but it was, it was, that was my universe. It was sort of living this parallel reality. And you were kind of, you were nerd. Oh yeah. Yeah, for sure. For sure. If I, if I can ask, you know, when I was a teenager, both my parents got cancer and you started here. Thank you. And likewise to you. I mean, I mean, your eight were you, were you an only child? I have a younger brother, a younger brother, two years younger. Okay. And so in your dad gets cancer, when, I mean, if you're okay, yeah, of course, it was this multi-year, protective thing. Yeah. So he had, he passed away when I was eight. He had cancer for probably six years. So most of my childhood. Okay. He had a lymphoma, which is obviously a relative rare kind of cancer. And you know, cycles of ups and downs over the year. So moments that he was very well, moments that he wasn't so well. But it was a big part of my childhood. Like how do you, I remember, you know, in the moment for me as a teenager, I mean, you, I don't think it was obvious to me sort of how it was changing me, but you know, a year or two ago, and you can kind of feel it. Was it obvious to you? You're so young or what is that? It's funny because I, I think I fully processed that maybe five years ago. Yeah. When you, when you sort of with the benefit of hindsight and perspective and living your own life and understanding that, you know, life is finite and all of that. And then you sort of appreciate the, you sort of re-signifying experience you've had as a kid. And that was probably when I really realized, but for sure in the moment, there were things that were that affected me, right? I think for a lot of this, this thing of building and coding, I think was how do you insert yourself in a place where you control all the variables? And the entire thing is in your control because the outside world isn't. So I think there was a, there's definitely a relationship there. And look, I think my mom did an amazing job raising me on my brother after I had passed away, but you see, you get exposed to, you know, yes, life is, you know, not infinite, you know, it should happen. That kind of thing early on and that certainly shapes your brain chemistry in where you're in other. And so, and then your mom's single mom from that point on. Yeah. And she was, it sounded like your family was kind of talkers and scientists. No, my mom was a psychologist, but she worked in, you know, psychology and sort of marketing and, more sort of a corporate life and working with you different companies in Brazil as I was growing up. So yeah, that was the backdrop. Were you like pining for Silicon Valley or you thought? Oh no. So my original plan was to just like live in Rio. Like most people that are born in Rio, and by the way, I understand them because the city is amazing. They never leave the city. So my brother, for example, he's 27 now and he's the sort of archetypical Carriacá, like the person born in Rio. And he would never, I think he's never going to leave. And so that was my sort of destiny. And then when I started our first company in Brazil in 2013. How old are you now? Now I'm 29. 29. Okay. Okay. So when we started that back in 2013, there was a first time that I actually left Rio and moved to São Paulo and then decided to apply for schools in the US because I always wanted to build something at a sort of US level scale. There were not that many big tech companies in Brazil back at that time. And we came in 2016 for after building a pagami our first company that was effectively a version of Stripe in Brazil. And then we moved to the US in 2016 to Stripe Brex. And did you see what the Carlson brothers had done with Stripe? So it's so funny. So we thought we were the original inventors of this idea of like, gosh, like payments are really bad for developers and engineers. Let's build a better version. And then one day we met someone and they said, oh, it's just like Stripe. And we're like, what is Stripe? So we met Patrick and John back then actually. We know them for a while. And because they went down to Argentina or something. Yeah, actually, I think they worked there in the various days of Stripe. Yeah. But you didn't meet them on that trip. I didn't. I think it was in 2011. We're still maybe doing too much show breaking. But we actually met them in probably 2014 or 15. That's when I met Patrick for the first time. And we've stayed in touch over the years. And we have a huge respect for them. So you're doing this jail breaking and then pagami is a payments system. I mean, did you feel this pull towards finance or it was just a problem that you just saw? So weirdly enough, the way I got into it is when I was 14, I actually changed jobs to a company in Brazil that was building sort of a version of square like mobile payments in your phone. And I went to work there initially to fix an iOS security issue. So there I was inside a payments company initially through this sort of iOS security angle. But very soon realizing how bad payments were and how old and arcade those systems were. And then I met Michael founder and Rika at the end of 2012. And he was in the sort of, okay, I am, I want to accept payments online. That is a really challenging thing to do. There isn't a better solution. And then I was like, well, I was inside a payments company. See how bad it was. So it was a little bit, you know, one plus one equals three from the perspective of the idea. And then as we started it, payments became this thing that we went very deep and started to understand better. And one of the things that I think was very big for us since that very inception was building from the bottom of the stack up. So we realized that at the end of the day, you know, payments companies were limited by these vendors. So they needed to use to actually interact with the foundational payment rails. So visa master card, like the equivalent of ACH and Fedwire. And as an engineer, to me, I had this like very almost religious view that you can never build a fundamentally better customer experience unless you control the entire stack all the way to the metal. A little bit the version of, you know, Steve Jobs just said that, you know, if you care about your hardware, about your software, should be your own hardware and just control the whole thing vertically. And we did that first in our previous company in Brazil and we built the entire processing stack and, you know, the acquiring rails and visa master card connections and all that. And then we did the same again at Brex. And I think there was a big reason of a lot of the success and the, you know, where we really started to innovate and being able to go after, you know, a lot of very large enterprise companies, AI companies because of the vertical integration with building the whole product. So, weirdly enough, I think the engineering mindset shaped the way we ended up building both on, but it's actually okay. I'm going to be gratuitous here and just lean in. Just Brex is our sponsor. You told me before we started, you haven't seen our videos that we make. And so I just want to show you, I'm going to try to do this artfully so we can have the camera. Great. See it. So you have not seen this before. You have not seen. I have not. No, but this is cool. All right. So we're doing an episode in Detroit and GM gave us a loner car. Wow. I want that. How do I get that? So GM gave us this car for the weight. Their lawyers did not properly, I found some wiggle room in the contract to do with the car as I saw fit. Wow. So we gave it to these guys to wrap it. Yeah. You've never seen this. Here we go. Meet sexy Brex. The intelligent finance vehicle. Fan fucking testing. Well this subtle product placement is awesome. That's really cool. It's not really the point of this video. That is so cool. We are here to check in. I love it. I love it. You know, so usually around this time we have an ad read. And I thought since you're here, I don't know if it's putting you on the spot. Would you like to do that? Yeah. I can't say about that. I can't really do that. They only give me 30 seconds. Well, I'll give you 30 seconds. No, look, I think the reality is we believe that managing spend is a fundamental necessity of building a great company because you become what you spend on. Right? A company. You literally are a byproduct of your spending and resource allocation decisions. And the fundamental problem is as a company gets bigger, you look at the financing and they are responsible for 100% of the spend, but they only make 5% of their decisions. 95% of the decisions of spending in a company are made by employees and leaders everywhere in different offices, in different countries. And that is an incredibly complex problem to coordinate. And a lot of what we believe at Brex is that typically as a company grows because of this amount of complexity is you have to choose either to put in a lot of controls in place and slow down the company because you need to have controls and make sure the money is going to the right place or you take off controls and then you increase speed. So speed and controls are just straight off. And the reason we built Brex is to break that trade off and give companies the agility of a startup all the way into becoming some of the largest companies in the world that run Brex today. So today we serve 35,000. 35,000. From the start to the world's largest. And 300 plus public companies, including Zoom, you know, Pound tier, and Drop-Bake Open AI. That's two weeks ago, Open AI. Yes. And- The Thumbnails before. Yeah, Robin Hood, you can go to our website and see the customer list, which is really exciting. One of the things we're really proud of is when we look into AI, we spend a lot of time making sure that we think about the role and how the finance function will fundamentally change. And all the big AI labs today, and like Cursor, Versel, of course, Open AI and Anthropic, you know, and you go down the list and record all of these companies run on Brex because of looking at our AI vision and believing that this is the way finance is going to work. And of course, they looked at all competitors and all the alternatives in the space and still ended up going with us, which is a very cool proof point, I guess, of the way we're building the product towards the future finance. All right. I was longer than 30 seconds, but- Well, well, wow, wow, what did you think of sexy Brex? I loved it. It's really cool. Pretty cool, right? Very cool. I want to get a car. I can make that happen. That's great. Okay. So, you know, you meet Enrique, you guys apparently get a fight, a Twitter spat at first, but then become best of friends and business partners. You both had off to Stanford together. It's kind of amazing that you both got in to Stanford. Yes. He convinced me to apply, actually. I heard what an SAT was for the first time. I think was mid-September, 2023, and that lines were in December. So there was a busy two and a half months. Yeah, I bet. And then- So you get to stay up for it. You guys don't stay around too long about eight months, I think. Yeah. That wasn't a regional plan. Yeah. But you needed a semester and a bit. Three quarters. That's how. Three quarters. And then the quarter system. And so you're already on to- you're thinking about your next idea. I mean, the one part that I picked up on was that you guys get into YC, you start with a VR company. Yeah. And then it kind of pivots into Brex. I mean, that's a pretty dramatic shift. I was curious about a couple things. I mean, as you're going through this very- unusual childhood and working on these different projects. Did you, what did you picture in your head? What was your dream? Like you was financed the. So it's funny because we moved to the US and we spent four or five years building Fintech in Brazil, you know, one or two before Pygarmy, then three and a half at Pygarmy. And the funny thing is when we came to the US, we had this idea of, you know, Fintech is a solved problem in the US. Brazil is this, you know, shitty country where, you know, Fintech is still unsolved. That's why it was an opportunity. But here we're going to be at the forefront of technology. So we went to this Microsoft store at Stanford Shopping Mall back in 2016. And we tried the first Oculus prototype, like an early version of Oculus. I think Oculus rift or something and were amazed. So we thought, let's just go build that. And in a very naive way, we thought we could do it. And then, you know, we spent, I don't know, two or three weeks playing with the hardware and the software and technology. And we realized that, you know, we knew nothing about hardware, nothing about optics. And then we decided to pivot to something that we knew a little more, which was software. So it took us maybe three or four weeks to pivot again. And then, and then, in my C, we saw that all companies needed a corporate card. And they couldn't get one. So they went to the banks and got rejected. The bank said, you know, you have no revenue history. And they said, yes, that's the point. That's why I'm, that's why I'm a startup. And even though you might have, seven million bucks, you couldn't get a corporate card. Just because you don't have this track corrected. Exactly. And we thought, well, but they have cash in the bank. So what's the risk? And the banks didn't get that. So that was the original idea that allowed Brexit scale was underwriting the company's based on cash and effectively build a better, a better American express. That was the original original thesis. And so it's supposed to be Brex, Brazilian, American. Well, instead of AMX. Brazilian Express, yeah. That's that's that's that. So, so the myth goes. It was a four-letter domain pronounceable in English with a backdrop name. Okay. A backdrop story for sure. So that that's how we got we got it off the ground. And in turns out it was one of the things that was interesting between Brazil and the US is there's actually this weird, you know, negative correlation between how developed an economy is and how I think bad their payment rails are. So, you know, when I was born in Brazil in '96, we had real-time settlements. Like the day I was born, it was not cheap, but you could settle a wire in real-time. We're in the US now in 2026, right? 29 years later. And you still don't have, you know, you have like partly, but you cannot, like not all payments are in real-time yet. And the reason is because when you look at Brazil in the 90s, we had hyperinflation. So the inflation was 30% a month. So if you didn't clear in two days, you lost like, I don't know, like, 57% of the value of the money. So there was a very deep investment in the payment rails because the economy needed it. And then the US, because it's such a stable economy and such a stable currency for, you know, hundreds of years, I don't think was as developed. So, weirdly enough, we saw a lot of room to actually revamp a lot of the financial stack in the US in a way that was bigger even than Brazil, just because of the scale of the economy. People explain this to me sometimes. I mean, you know, if you go to Europe, they're doing all kinds of amazing, like very interesting stuff with financial systems. When I go to China, it's insane. Even like I went to Nigeria to shoot an episode of our show, you know, there's parts of it that are like really backward, but then there's other parts where you're paying for your own phone at like whatever the chicken job is. And then South America is in Mexico quite famous for innovating on financial tech. And so the US always seems to be behind, it reminds me of like when I was starting out as a reporter, we were just wofl at telecommunications and Europe was so far ahead and then like the iPhone sort of rescued the US and made it interesting again. But I mean, people have told you went over some of the points of this like stability, but other people said to me it's because we have our banking system. Yeah, we have thousands of banks in the US. So, for example, like Brazil, the central bank created this payment rail is called Bix, which is effectively a real time settlement between any two accounts. You can use your phone number or your tax ID as a key. And then it finds a bank account and it can act transparent to you right now, like almost any amount, which by the way has other security implications in Brazil, which the system ended up handling later, but that's a separate story. And then in the US, but in Brazil, you have really probably 30 major banks in the US, you have thousands, like two or three thousand banks today. So when you wonder about anything new at a systemic level, you have to go in bank by bank and make sure they comply. So even if you look at RTP like real time payments, today, the ubiquity is of course a big bank supported, but if you're transferring to a community bank or a regional bank, a lot of times they don't support because technology is really behind in terms of adoption. So being more concentrated also allowed for a faster innovation cycle. So, but I would say it was the fact that the economy really needed it, right? In Brazil, because a lot of the payments were in cash and offline and even on cards, the government saw this need for first sort of bringing and modernizing payments. And the central bank in Brazil, I think they're an amazing job with that. And then second was moving more of the economy outside of cards into something that the government had more agency over. And these movements were easier just because of like one, the pain point that existed in second, the concentration of banks. I'm going like, I was going to go chronologically, but now I just want to talk about this for a second. And so the US is destined to be woefully behind the rest of the world on many interesting financial innovations. We're stuck unless we kind of change this. And the US has this has a lot of particular things that when you look at the amount of the economy and credit cards, for example, of course, you have rewards, which is a very big part of the decision making factor. You have no real-time payments and some things. And especially most of my movements actually not real-time today in the US. You still have a lot of ACH that takes two or three days to clear. There's no, for example, something you have in Brazil, which I think is fascinating, is you have a clearing house for receivables. So because the interest rates so high and the country is so dependent on factoring of any receivable you have when you have a contract or something, you actually have a centralized clearing house that you can register a contract and get a prepayment on that contract. Doesn't exist in the US. So there's a lot of things that are very different. But at the same time, Chris, a lot of opportunities for companies like us to go in and do new things. And I, okay, and then, this next question comes with some baggage because you're going to be in whenever the deal closes, part of Capital One, it's a traditional financial player. I just always found this shocking, because I followed Stripe, I knew Patrick and John when they were like, I don't know, there's like eight people in the room or something like that. And then just the story, you were describing about startups, had money in bank, people wouldn't lend to them. It's sort of, I mean, in some ways it makes sense because this is the story of businesses that incumbents move slow and don't see opportunities. In other ways, I find it really shocking that Stripe could become such this foundational layer, this massive, multi-multipilion dollar business that the traditional financial companies were just apparently willing to see to these two Irish kids. You know, Brex just took off like a rocket ship from this insight that you guys had and you being able to code all this infrastructure to make it happen. Yeah, like, are there still, are there, is that typical? This is the same as I would see if I went into the energy industry in defense or is finance uniquely kind of conservative and bad? I think it's, you know, if the history of technology serves us any backdrop, I would say, I don't think finance is to this similar. What I would say is, I think the interesting aspect is first, just a scale that finance has in terms of how businesses operate and how ubiquitous it is as a part of what makes just the US economy work. So, for example, you look at Brex and we created this new category of modern, modern, software and financial services together. When you look into the US economy today, we made a lot of progress, but 97% of the US economy still runs on traditional corporate parts. 97% and there's a lot of room to grow in terms of just expanding what we've done and serving the rest of the market. And when we got approached by Capital One, the interesting thing for us was we started to think, okay, where can the company be that's in five, seven, ten years in a standalone path? And then what if we joined forces with yes and incumbent, but actually, I think the most tech forward bank in the world that really realized that you could bring in data and machine learning and technology to revolutionize credit cards in the way underwriting was done. And by the way, they're sort of fascinating stories of how Capital One started that. And what could we do having that platform at a scale? And as we started to click into that, it was impossible to unsee it. And really the way you think about it is, how do you bring the scale brand credit of major US financial institution with the technology and product we have? And in a very interesting way, the thesis behind this is exactly what you were describing is how do you accelerate the adoption curve of this technology that we believe should be core to how every business runs, but do it at a scale that is country affecting, right? That you actually inflect the outcomes of so many businesses that depend on these things to run an operate and are still working in with technology of I 34 years ago. Hello geniuses. Let me tell you about E1 Ventures. They are venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, a long time supporter of this podcast and a long time supporter of big, fantastic world changing ideas. If you have such an idea, hit up E1 Ventures or send me a note and I'll put you in touch with E1 Ventures. It's quite a deal for listening to this podcast. Thank you again, as always, to E1 Ventures for their support. And these things, I mean, they do work sometimes these types of arrangements. It's also not uncommon for the big incumbent company to reject the innovation arm that they have purposely sent out to acquire for that very reason. Yeah. So it's funny because one of the things that, well, two things that was very impressed by Capital One, one was just the speed. So from inception of this idea, all the way to sign definitive agreement was a little over 40 days. They actually moved to a lot of conviction and speed. And second was the fact that being a founder like company really changes the calculus for how you do things. And speaking to it to Rich and the Capital One team, one of the major things that they realized was, look, the most important thing for us to think about as we make this work is don't crush the butterfly. So how do you leverage the scale and the distribution and all the benefits of Capital One, but also keep the things that are uniquely brex and may brex into what it is today alive and growing and the way Rich, the founder, describes it as, how do we just add water to the brex plants? And of course, be very mindful about the risk management aspects and the aspects that are inherent to being a bank. But also leverage the scale and the distribution. So I would say there's been so much thoughts on how to make this as lightweight of an integration as possible to preserve the momentum that brex had as a standalone company and actually accelerate it. So when you look into the outcome here, we're really thinking three to five years, the company will be just dramatically bigger than what it will be on a standalone basis because of the water and the scale that the Capital One brings. - Let me ask one annoying reporter question. I mean, you, at one point, you guys are valued at $12.3 billion in 2022, is a different world for a variety of reasons. You sell the company for $5.15 billion. I mean, look, I think anyone would be happy with that outcome, but it is the major of the beast than that some people compare your previous valuation to this number and we're in this total frenzy of you guys, some companies that shouldn't be named. All competing against each other very, very vocally, very aggressively. I saw some rent cheerleaders celebrating this 5.15 billion number. - Yeah, I mean, it's gotta be a weird feeling to like, you're having this great moment. - Yeah. - There's a lot of money. You've accomplished something. It marks a moment in time and then, you know, I guess it's competition, but then for it to be portrayed by some people one way. - So I think there's two sides of this. So the first one is one of the things that we realized in 2023 is the company was in a very different position than today. And we decided to sort of aggressively turn things around and that was end of '23 or '24. And one of the things that we did is there was very impopular and externally back then is we actually did a big reset on the internal valuation. So, yes, of course, we raised that $12 billion. That's a fact. But at the same time, how do you create enough upside for employees so that a $5 billion outcome is a win and that's what we did. So, when we entered a board, we actually reprised all the employee equity at a much different price. And that effectively really changed the picture for employees and the team and, you know, investors that invested a $12 billion, of course, you know, got the preference back. So, it ended up being actually a very good outcome for everyone. But the key thing was in the moment where things were the hardest like three years ago, actually looking ourselves in the mirror and saying, look, you know, I always say, you know, hard decisions easy life, easy decisions hard life. And the hard decision was we let go of, you know, almost 30% of the company, we reprised the equity, we changed the way you operate a lot, we promoted a lot from within, we took out two layers of management in the entire company and we started this thing that I called Bracks 3.0. So, that backdrop was how we got to where we are today and by the way, where we're still accelerating, even faster than when we closed the deal, when we signed the deal back in January. So, I would say the best way to think about it is, we made a lot of deliberate decisions two and a half, three years ago that made this a win for employees because we decided to face reality and actually look at it with the lens of everything eventually converges to public markets. Whether you like it or not, that's the only price signal that really matters. So, how would you think of the company today if it was a public company and how do you ground ourselves in that reality? As hard as the painful as it might be because, you know, the fairytales was 2021 were just that, fairytales. So then, and then I think the second piece is, you know, of course, there's competition in the space. It's a massive part of the U.S economy, massive part of Fintech and you'll be ludicrous to think that there wouldn't be. But I think the best way to think about it is, you know, as in all modern competitors in the space, we're still 3% of the U.S. market. So the question becomes, how do you go after 97%? And what we decided to do at BRX is we said, look, the reality is the chances of hitting two orders of magnitude, bigger scale, together partnering with a massive incumbent are fundamentally different. And as we started to actually just see the scale of like, for example, like capital one spends $6 billion a year in marketing, we spend, you know, around 1% of that, $6 billion in R&D. We spend, you know, 2% or 3% of that. So when you just apply the scale into the problem and it would just accelerate what's working, the question for us was, how do you solve for the 97% and how do we declare winner there and subordinate all decisions to that, including structure, the capital, you know, all that. Because for me, it was always about, at the end of the day, I wanted BRX to become a major part of the U.S. economy, BRX to outlive and outlast me. And the same way I looked back, I left my previous company in Brazil 10 years ago, and in Pagarmus, still second or third largest player in Brazil in online payments. I want the same to be true of BRX and I want to be here for the next many years. But still, I think that the scale, solving for scale and just the reach of this technology in the way the average business runs was fundamentally a different thing to solve and it's still a very early days. - Well, please introduce Capital One's marketing budget to the sexy BRX and what's possible. - Yeah. - And okay, and as far as like you've been on this, I mean, it just feels like a whirlwind, man. I mean, you're starting business around 12. And here you are, you're 29. I mean, it's been non-stop one thing after another. You've been actually like to your credit. Super open, you write these essays from time to time about big moments in your life, mental health things, things about you had this really nice note about your mom. - Thank you. - And I know you talked about some of the, the decisions she had made, but you know, she seemed like a kind of like unconventional thinker around around a variety of things with this kid who was who was living an unconventional life. And so anyway, I found you're like really you're quite thoughtful and open about these things. Do you, is there like part of you though, yeah, that just feels like you've been on this, you've just been carried, you know, not like you were not an active participant, but I mean more that you've been bounding from one thing to the next on this ride like is there, I always ask the calluses this, okay, because they're like two of the smartest people I know they are polymast, they're interested in so much different stuff. I know financial tech is very important. It's not the particular thing that like, I think about all the time. And so you know, I'm always like, what do you guys, what do you guys like want out of life, you know, because, because is this, is this just the thing that you made when you're young and it turned into this huge hit and you're trying to, they always talk about increasing the GDP of the internet in the world. And I see that right, it opens, I went with Patrick to Israel and Palestine and I saw people who were setting up businesses on Atlas that like otherwise just could not incorporate their company and now selling to the entire world. So like I get it, I'm not trying to undermine something, but like is there part of you that just feels like you've, are you making all these conscious decisions or you've just been pulled off this journey? Yeah, it's a great question. I think, I think it's a little bit of both because I would say on one hand, you know, I really like to believe that especially now you can, with AI, learning new things is a fundamentally lower barrier than it's ever been. So if I said, look, I'm going to learn how to make X. I think it's possible to learn and master that at the same time, I think the sets of opportunities that exist that are interesting, they tend to be related to domains that are explored in the past. And I think your ability to recognize what's a good opportunity is also higher in things that you have more exposure to. So I don't think we would have been able to build Brexit if we hadn't build our first company in Brazil because we just knew too much about payments. We were just very deep in the weeds. We knew the issues with credit card issuing. We knew like what the acquiring side looked like on the merchant side. We knew a little bit of credit underwriting. Our first company was also regulated by the central bank, MWD officers of that. So there were a lot of conditions that made Brexit possible. So in a weird way, I think it creates the set of experiences that make the next impossible. And I think there's something that the Jensen says that I think is really true, which is, you know, at the end of the day, it's easier to learn to fall in love with what you do than to do something that you love because I think when you think about love and sort of deep connection to a craft, ultimately something that I think is very deeply encouraging is when you feel the sense of mastery of something. And not from an ego perspective, but from the perspective of I just understand every layer of this problem. And I can think about second order effects. I can think about implications and I can see the world through a much bigger aperture because I have this unusually high exposure to this problem. And I think there's something about that in Fintech where the more you think about, you know, and we see this with AI, like we spend a lot of time looking into what actually changes when you start to deploy AI agents and companies. And of course, the early things are, yes, there's a bunch of cost savings. Like second, there's, you know, compliance increases and data quality increases and automation increases. But then you look into like a layer deeper and you see like, okay, how much time does the, does the US economy spend like managing expenses and turns out it's 50 million hours. And then we're like, okay, like how many things can we do possibly that contribute 50 million hours to the US economy? And, you know, we'll go to these agents that automate all the teeny process and, you know, and you see the impact inside a customer and it's pretty remarkable. The reactions to the finance teams are they say, well, actually didn't even think this was possible even with technology today. And this is like, by the way, I'm like, anthropic and open AI, like that are sort of the bleeding edge of AI and deploying AI internally. So, but then it's like, okay, how would we even recognize that that opportunity existed? And it goes all the way down from, well, you know, yes, we were building corporate cards originally and corporate cards are a big part of how spend gets initiated in the company. And turns out that, you know, initiating and making spend decisions requires, you know, a lot of sort of delegated decision making. So you need to create tools that empower the financing to be in every decision, what can help with that AI. And then, well, how to make AI really, you know, really effective at scale and give the financing control over how AI is operating. And then you build a lot of agents. So, so you sort of you sort of cascade this down. And there's seven or eight hops from the original idea, all the way to the outcome that we deliver today. And these things were recognizable because of a previous pattern. So, so I think that's the part that's like hard to understand. So I wouldn't say to overstate, I wouldn't say that it's I'm sort of a, like I am, you'll be irresponsible. So not that's something that's not fintech, like, like, but there's something to be noted about the fact that you get certain places because of where you've been in the past. And I'm grateful for the experiences that sort of exposed me to the the issues and the problems and the solutions that I was able to build by having the other distract. And do you think this is going to maybe it's really, I mean, you're still so young 29. Yeah, I read about you being obsessed with space documentaries when you were a kid. Yeah. Yeah. I hit you up on a on an AMA asking what you were interested in outside of fintech. And you mentioned space and energy. Do you think there's like another chapter in your life where you dig in on something like that? Or is that something maybe you're investing in and and it's on the side? I mean, I am in the sort of a spirit of both topics. You know, I'm actually very curious about robotics now and trying to understand what's head of frontier. And of course, you see Tesla and Optimus and all of that, but also what are sort of more, you know, bootstrapped versions of that. And in new companies building things that are pretty interesting. So that's been a big area. I'm just meaning like you you just keep an eye on it or you're you're I'm getting mostly keep an eye on it and try to you know, invest in a few things, but but I would say that's sort of a newer curiosity over the past maybe like three to six months. Okay. When you look into like things I'm spending a lot of time is is you know, I am really interested in this idea of virtual employees. So how do you actually deploy virtual employees inside a company that we'll can feel and act like an employee. So they are real people of real names on Slack on email engaging of people joining meetings. I got obsessive open claw over the past like three months. And you know, automated my entire life. I can tell you more about that, but these are the things that I'm spending a lot of hours now. No, no, please do. Do you have a do you have a human admin? I do. I do. And then is this human admin competing against your virtual. They they they I would say they don't over a lap as much as they deliberately. My my my human admin is amazing, but I I would say no. So look, I think I think the how we got here, right? And I think Opus 4.5 was a GI or very close to a GI. And Opus 4.6 was the sort of missing the sort of rough edges that you know got a little better. So the way I think about it is, you know, electricity was invented in December. We're now in March. What are the things that you can build the electricity now? And that is the big question. And and to me the the fundamental capability jump was that of course coding models were the the very interesting thing that that you see quad code and all these all these Asian harnesses evolving, but actually think the most interesting property that was unlocked was the capability of a model of self bootstrap. So so basically one of the things that were experimenting in high brex is actually using OpenClaw to create virtual employees. So we created this virtual recruiter for example, we call him Jim. And Jim is literally a slack entity. His slack person has his own email and engages and talks to recruiters internally. And the thing the whole challenge was how do you build Jim without riding a single line of code? And the idea is and of course there was still semi technical we've been involved because it was one of our first early iterations of this. But but the really interesting thing is you see a recruiter engaging with Jim and then saying, you know, for example, I just saw this before coming in here. A recruiter were saying, look, can I take a look at this person's application? I have a sense that this resume was fabricated. So how do you How do you look at that? And then the agent looked at that and actually builds a capability of screening a resume and understanding if it was fabricated or not. And that was never coded by anyone. And I think that's the fundamental leap that we were missing. And a lot of what we're spending time thinking is how to deploy this safely, of course, inside Brex. And there's a lot of things on the security side that we're also spending a lot of time. Because I feel the challenge of the industry is that now, as people say, well, you can't predict what models do. They're not safe. Therefore, I'm not going to use something like OpenClaw in a very important environment because who knows what's going to happen. And the stance that we decided to take is saying, well, why don't we just solve for the security aspects and then actually deploy these things internally and leverage that I can have technology and see where the front here really is. So we're actually going to open source this. We actually build this entire technology layer. We actually call it crab trap, finally enough, where the idea is when you have something like OpenClaw running, the best way to monitor what an agent is doing isn't to have a human looking at it. It's actually have another LLM looking at it. So we build this thing that effectively intercepts all the traffic coming out of like an OpenClaw instance and routes it through another LLM that's through an HTTP proxy that screams all the traffic and says, is this something that a recruiter agent should be doing? So for example, should a recruiting agent send like a harmful message to a candidate? No. Anything can go in and block that request at the network layer while the agent itself is even not even aware that that's happening. And the really cool thing of that is you can actually run this at scale. And the only technology that we think will be able to monitor agents is actually agents themselves. You build this almost adversarial effect or you have one agent monitoring and other agents. And we've seen surprisingly good outcomes of this thing so far. So does that mean that we're deploying OpenClaw and virtual employees in the most critical work folks in the company? Not yet. We're deploying a few. But the really interesting thing is instead of saying, well, let's hold back and not deploy these things because at the frontier, we haven't resolved security yet. We said, no, why don't we just solve security, which is a systems problem. It's distributed systems problem more than anything else. It's an engineering challenge. And then the technology in the LLM and the state of the art of the models is already wildly capable except for just one problem that we'd rather solve around. So that's been like fascinating. And then we were saying, and you're using OpenClaw in your life? I mean, is this stuff you're talking about? Well, no, this is personal. We're using OpenClaw in a bunch of different contexts. Virtual employees is one. The other one is I use it personally to do everything. Like what? At this point. I literally run Brex through OpenClaw right now. So the way it works is, I think most, there's a lot of productivity tools of AI, right? And I think the thing they fail is that they don't assume that the world is a very noisy place. So when I go into Brex, Brex has like thousands of Slack channels, like thousands of people, thousands of, I receive like hundreds of emails a day. And the question is like, what matters? Like what to pay attention to? So I build this auto pilot system that starts with this signal ingestion pipeline. And basically the way it works is it screens my email, my Slack, Google Docs, WhatsApp, a few different data sources. And then, but a really interesting thing is I decided to build my automation and my life around two concepts, people and programs. So programs is almost like a project that I want to be updated on. So for example, financial performance of the company, Capital One integration. You know, AI strategy internally. And the thing about a program is it's very declarative about what I care about and what I don't care about. And then what it does is it screens those signals in the context of these programs and then organizes, you know, interactions that happen that I should be aware or action items. And it does the same for people. There are also people that I care about. So I declare who are the people that I care about and there's probably 25 people in the company and in my life more broadly, I declare those people and what are the things that I actually care about. And then the signal ingestion filters with the lens of these people, it denormalizes signals and then it processes them. And then it produces this very clean summary of everything that's happening in the company that I should care about and all the action items. And then there's a really cool part, which is all the action items that I should do are things like, well, I finished the customer conversation. I need to go in and update the deal team on that account or I had a meeting someone asking for an intro or all these things that are follow-ups from meetings. And the cool thing is because I have the signal ingestion, I can go in and I have this other thing called an auto resolver that it can go into the list of two dues that I have and say, how do I automatically action this task based on the context from the meeting? So for example, like let's say I go in and I say, we should talk about, I want to figure out how to get in that car. Let me have a follow-up on that. So then I can have granola listening to the conversation. granola is running on every meeting that I have ingesting that into the signal ingestion pipeline, creating an action item. And then when the auto resolver runs, it says, okay, what's the context for this to do this task that I have? It will go back to the notes. And then it can say, well, I can send you a text or send you a Slack message or you an email depending on, you know, whatever is best. And then it can draft the message automatically. And then all I have to do is click a button. So all of these are building blocks and skills that you can build together. You can do it on an open claw or a claw and I actually have it running on an open claw now to effectively decompose the CEO job of like ingesting signals, what matters, building a summary, determining tasks, making those tasks happen, monitoring my team for those tasks. And I can also go then and build skills. So for example, I can go in and say, well, a way to auto resolve is a Slack message or is there's a skill that I created called review a doc as Pedro. So there are things when I'm reviewing a document or a product review or a presentation that I always ask. So I like, for example, like, you know, what is the most important thing that this thing should be driving and like how they would choose that thing? What's the bottleneck making this thing happen to go faster? You know, why aren't we moving faster? There's like three or five questions that I want to ask. So I basically make that into a skill and then you build that into the pipeline. So it's basically legal blocks that you can put together to accomplish really complicated things through these systems. And of course, like I, as an engineer, I had to go and build these things. But I think I want to open source this. But it's basically this entire like CEO or I guess like almost like, you know, leader in an information based company workflow. And it's been really fun to build it. So it sounds like I mean, you just got really sucked into this and you just mentioned any you're doing this. Yeah, like, yeah, like it's the age I psychosis, I would say. We have a rule at home, which is no AI Saturdays. My wife is like, because like I'm basically like talking to my open club all the time, like I'm sending voice notes. Yeah. And it's the best developer experience because it can be like on the way here, I was like, I had this like synchronization issue on my data pipeline. So I was like literally sending voice notes saying, Hey, like, change this, change that. Do this. Do that. And it's amazing. Like I can be on the car. I was in a way more like coming in here and getting getting a bunch of things done. So the problem is it's so easy. They started doing it all the time. So then I can be having dinner and send voice notes and my wife's like, stop. Let's have dinner. And then Saturdays, no AI's, no AI home, which is kind of a fun day. And when you were living such a frenetic life and getting pulled in all these different directions and you kind of, you know, you talk, I've had a panic attack. You talked about having a panic attack. You talked about getting in the meditation and reading and sort of changing your nighttime ritual. Like what kind of things do you read at night? Gosh. Right now I'm reading a totally different thing. I'm reading a bantering Franklin's biography by Walter Isaacson, which is actually quite good. Ever heard that one? Yeah. Yeah. Very interesting. I mean, I generally like the DaVinci ones also very good because I think there's this thing where in a weird way, a hundred, a couple hundred years ago, or even longer, I think the sort of renaissance man, this like multifaceted person that knew a little bit or actually even a lot about different domains was a big thing. And intersection of arts and science is something that I like a lot. And you know, Benjamin Franklin was a not only of course had a massive effect on as the founding father and the definition of what the US is, but also as an inventor and he was so deep in the electricity and things like that. And that's very remarkable. Journalist? Journalist, of course. and you know, Ambassador for the US in France for the first time in the right after the independence. So it's remarkable to read it. Does that look to you like nonfiction? I almost always read nonfiction. Yeah. I read your book, The Elon Book, which is very good. I think so much of what I enjoy is trying to understand a seven's frame of mind. And one of my favorite questions, it's a weird question, but it's what is the experience of being you? And it's a profound question, because there's a few like mental models in your head when you look at the world that sort of shape your experience of acting and being a person. And I think that's very profound. So when you read these like biographies that go very deep, I think ultimately what you're getting to is like what is the experience of being this person? And great biographers, since I'm sure you know, like oh, oh, similarly, that's what you're trying to crack, right? You're trying to, you're trying to, there's all these stories and it's almost like, you know, there's this elephant that you're touching different parts and you're trying to triangulate what is the entirety of this person? And I think biographies are great at that. I mean, I read, I read, you know, I read a few technical books on, you know, the art of being science engineering from Strait Press. I read a lot of things that are relatively technical, but I think biographies and things that go very deep, the end video way from Bob Jenson, I think gives you that same mental model. And ultimately, I think, you know, it's the Charlie Munger thing, you know, at the end of the day, being successful is a collection of like 30 to 40 good mental models and just applying them everywhere and I think seeing how remarkable people have different sets of these like 30, 40, 50 different mental models I think is pretty fascinating. Yeah, no, by everybody, yes, we could talk for a long time about that. Oh, very strange. It's still fun. Doing one as well. What was the like? What were the. God, I set myself up for that then. You know, I mean, I really could talk for hours. It was funny in some ways because I at that moment in time, I wanted to do a book. I'd gone to see SpaceX. I was working on a magazine story about Elon. I'd not like set out to do like a biography on Elon Musk, but I, you know, when I went to SpaceX, it was just so different and further along. Then I pictured in my head and it was just right in Los Angeles. It was like, it was striving and just had this energy. And anyway, that's what kind of sucked me in and then I got interested in Elon, you know, interacting with him and reporting the story. And then, so anyway, you know, I signed up for this thing. But I had no idea what I was getting into in the sense that you spend three years thinking about this one person. And that's like your job. It's like, it's very all-consuming. You know, you start to have dreams about that person. Well, all the things you mention, you try to do, hopefully you're trying to do a good job. And so you're not, you're trying to talk to a bunch of people to get at what you're talking about. It's like, it's like, Elon's always going to represent sort of like how he wants to be represented. And then you're trying to talk to all these other people to try and relate. I don't know if you ever get to truth, but some version of that that you're conveying, at least you can give people, well, this is how these other people experience him. And try to create as full of a picture as you can. But then you get into this, it becomes very strange, right? It's like I'm thinking about him all day. You're like having dreams. I'm not even diagnosed. I get sucked up. I want some peace. So there was just part of it that I didn't expect a lot of what you're talking about, though. You're trying to put yourself in this person's shoes. And then there's this strange thing where you're like, you're, I don't know, I don't know if I was ever really trying to pass judgment, but you are passing judgment on certain things for the people that are going to read this book. And then it's just like a lot of, I don't know if it's like pressure, but I think if you're wired the right way, you kind of, you want to do a good job at it. Yeah, it's very strange. And then after that, you know, that book became such a hit that there's just all these things I didn't sign up for. You know, you're like the Elon guy. And it's like, yeah, I found it fascinating, but I'm interested in lots of shit. Yeah. Yeah. I don't need to be the Elon guy for a 10, 100 percent. It's so, but you know, I think the gift of, you know, radioographers is a, well, just books in general, right? Is I don't think people realize how remarkable it is that you spend three years of your life dedicated to this. And I can sit down in four days and consume that. I think that's such a profound, such a profound realization. This is a crazy amount of work. Yeah. When the heavens went on sale, the one I just did, that was six years. And it was just, it's like, it is, it's kind of crazy. I mean, I love it. That's actually the most fun part is the journey, you know, in like the process and it's amazing. By the time you finish the book, you've worked out for so long. You've read it so many times, which is like, I never need to look at this again. It's just like, now I want to do the next thing, but that, that exactly what you said is also what I love about magazine writing. It's why I like to work in a business week for so long was that I got to go, you know, you know, condensed smaller form than the book to go like live your life for some version of your life for three, four months. Yeah. And like inhabit these worlds, right? And like see what people's mental models are like and see what they're, you know, it's not always perfect because again, people are putting on personas and things like that. But if you, if you spend a decent amount of time at it, and I'm sure that what you do, the better you get it cracking it. A little bit, right? I think. Yeah. And but that's the best part of the job is like, yeah, I just get to see, it's like, oh, this is how like Brian Johnson lives. This is how Johnson lives. This is how, you know, Jennifer Downal lives. And it's like, yeah, it's just cool to sort of shed your own ego for a bit and just just walk. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks Brian. Well, I want to be mindful of your time. I just, I just kind of like a couple of last, I mean, there were more just like, just out their questions. I guess I mean, I'm just so curious what you think, like the future of money is in 20 years. Yeah, I think, I mean, I think I think you're going to have a lot of the, the, the sort of payment, you know, evolution, right? You see, he's a, he's a mastercard, right? Positioning themselves on stable. You see, of course, striped doing a lot of moves there. So I think there's going to continue. But I actually think that's less interesting. What I think is more interesting is the, the decisions to spend money itself. And I fundamentally believe that, you know, you become what you spend on as a company, as an individual. You become your resource allocation in terms of the people you hire, in terms of the, the decisions you make, the technology you use, right? You know, one of the, the quotes that I, I really like is, you know, we shape our tools and our tools shape us. So, so I think the way, I think there's going to be a fundamentally higher level of thinking behind how companies make financial decisions. And, and you can imagine that a lot of it is this problem of context and just aggregating the information and understanding what are the implications of this decision. To, of course, the revenue, the costs, but, but even to things like the culture of the company, to the, the vision and the mission and what are you trying to do. And these things cascade down all the way into a single individual Wednesday, right? So, you know, you know, there's this thing that I forgot how to say that, but life is a picture, but it'll live on a pixel. So, at the end of the day, you know, you can talk about these visions, but it has to materialize on a mundane Wednesday. Like, how does that change your mundane Wednesday? And I think when you have this, this autopilot to the way companies make decisions and you fundamentally change the calculus of where capital is going to be more aligned to where, what matters to you as a company. And as an individual, I think it's a very big unlock. And I think it's, it's going to be more profound than people realize. And of course, AI is going to enable that. And you're going to need, of course, a lot of the payments, technology, the agentic payments, like agentic commerce. All these things will play a role. But ultimately, like, you know, what's the icing on the cake and what's the cake itself? And the cake itself to me is this idea that, you know, the quality and the ability and the level of discernment that you're going to have in financial decisions, because you can have so much of this context is like, what if you had the best CFO in the world, making every decision? You know, the best, you know, founder in the world, helping make higher decisions. What if you had the best person in the world deciding where to, where to expand next, where to grow, how to grow, how to look at your economics? And I think that will become true in the next few years. And hopefully we'll play a big role in it. But it's like, it's going to happen regardless. So then, companies just, like, if everybody has some sort of perfect information and they have the ideal CFO and the ideal all these positions. I mean, so you just still end up competing on your product and your your so that's that that's the fascinating thing which we have had a lot of so for example we're building this recruiting agents. And I think the models are because of the amount of like post-training that goes into them they have this relative uniform view of what is a good candidate. But then the question becomes what is a good candidate for us. And I think it's like like like focus and constraints are what give meaning to your choices. So when you have to go to recruiter and you say what are you willing like where does person need to spike on? And how do you hire for that instead of sort of lack of weaknesses which is where the models generalize and go typically right model is very hard to make a model say no. And I think that's a very profound learning because that is the hard question. Yeah. It's like what what where does like spikiness matters right where does it matter to be you know astronomically difference. And and I think that's where the judgment comes in of the what kind of company when a bill and I think that's an inherently human decision that you're giving it that flavor. Yeah. That's the challenge. It's like how do you give that taste of brexiness. Yeah, because there's like a world where the AI recruiter doesn't want you or George hot because you look pretty weird. Exactly. Yeah. And one of the things that we do is like one of the factors that we really like is I mean of course I'm biased by this but it's who were people that did something. At a moment in their life where they had absolutely no other reason besides love for the game. Yeah. Love for the craft. And well people that are coding in high school don't have any reasons to code. Maybe getting into college but you can just tell based on the kinds of things they feel in the relationship they have with the craft. People that were doing completely different jobs like someone that was in finance but ended up going super deep in AI and cloud code and build this massive thing to automate their jobs. They didn't have to do that but they did it anyway. That was driven by something pure. So so that is something that we care about a lot and we want to teach our recruiters to do it. But that's us that may not be true for every company and I think the disability to to understand the ethos of what you care about when it comes to this function and separating that from the technical excellence. I think it's a really important thing because the technical excellence I think will be sure no matter what. And the point about the ethos the reason a model can discern that is because like that is a choice and you can really argue with is it better to hire someone that's started coding before they had to in their lives or to hire someone that went to an academic route and has a PhD in machine learning and an AI and it's going to go to research at open AI or in traffic. It depends. It depends on what kind of company you want to build. And I think that's the part that's really interesting is if you just take out all the things that are not about the ethos away and you give that job to the models, what remains. And these are the harder questions. The ones that require a lot of discernment and I think it's where people should spend a lot more time. What's the UI on your cloud? Your cloud plot? The UI. I have an autopilot UI that has all my tasks and all my entire systems. It's just a little web UI. But it's almost like a cloud project. It's a no, it's like a website that server that it runs. And then I talk to you on Telegram and I use this word for multi channel and sub agent coordination and things like that. So like if you're trying to set up a tennis match on Sunday at 3pm, are you like, are you just I would send the voice note. And then like it would what if it needed to book the court and it has well it actually has a something that we're shipping a brex very soon. It has access to a way of creating virtual cards on brex through an MCP. So we go do that. Go into the website, put a card on file, come back and say, hey, it's done. So the agent would go to that. Is there like any way I'm spending three days assembling and answering questions about my personal taxes in 10 years? No way. To do my tax return. Absolutely. No way. That's not good. Well, and it's going to happen on both sides. Right. The IRS will also be doing your taxes for you. And then it's going to be. Yes, exactly. So it's I think that's probably true. Right. It's something really. But, but you know, I tell people everybody's going to be audited because the cost is going to be zero. Yeah. That'll be an interesting. Well, it drives me insane. It's like all I do. It's a lot of hours just to gather up all these documents every year. Some believe when my computer can just be doing this. All the people. Yeah. Yeah. And the thing that's interesting is, you know, it's a fundamentally different problem. It's almost like there's the tax software. And there's the bookkeeping job. And the bookkeeping job part of it is interacting with the tax software. But another part is gathering at a documentation and going in and asking you about specific expenses and transactions and what they worry and what they worry. And yeah, the bookkeeping job is the is a really interesting part which become part of the software eventually. So what like what I mean, I count and become like lawyers. I mean, they're just handling the highest. I, yes, difficult questions. I think so. I think so. And I think the my my thesis is like, for example, on accounting. I think you still have a bookkeeper because you need a CPA to file your taxes. That's like a legal requirement. Like if you're fighting someone's taxes on their behalf, you have to be a CPA. And the beautiful thing of the system and the way it works actually is a CPA has some degree of personal liability in case there's something wrong with your taxes. And that creates a very, very good back pressure in the system where well, because someone is personally liable, they better make sure that the data is correct. So the better they better be sure the tools are using have a high enough bar for accuracy and control. So, so I think that's actually a really powerful thing where I like even if you have like Harvey and let's say the lot, the lot, you know, like AI, sorry, I take a lot firms doing doing really great work, having a human in the end matters because, you know, we talk a lot of all this idea like what if Jim makes a makes a very big mistake on hiring. Like do you hold Jim accountable or do you hold an employee accountable and actually you need the same oversight mechanisms that you have of employees. So Jim has a manager. There's someone on the recruiting that's actually Jim's manager signs off on all the action. That's that a hard talk. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And give feedback, right? And give access to tools instead of budgets and, you know, have ways of giving feedback and make sure the feedback is incorporated. And fire Jim and change Jim in case things go wrong. So I mean, firing is more, more, more figure speech, but ultimately the idea, I think this idea of oversight over agents. And how do you get humans comfortable with the fact that agents are doing things on their behalf? I think is a very fascinating problem. Have you had a agent pay for something on your behalf? Yeah, like like through Brex or through the system? Through well, open claw through a card, a Brex initiated card, a Brex-sweeted card. Okay, like you're doing this all the time or this is no. No, so I mean, I don't do it like I'd hardly do like once a week, I would say, even though I make an online purchase, probably like every two or three days. So I would say it's like a third, but I am also trying to deliberately push the boundaries. So a fun one was a letter, a couple of friends that were going to the movies and then they they send us, hey, here are our seats. And then I literally just forwarded the message to to my open claw and I said buy the tickets nearby. And then it went online when the cinema website found the movie room, found the the time, found where they were seated and said, well these two seats are taking you should take the ones next. And then I was like sure and then it went online, put the card details, made the payment and it was done. And then I got an email confirmation and I didn't touch anything. Do you have a name for your open claw system? I do, it's a funny, I call it lemon pie, which is a weird thing because when I was 12, my first AI agents, I call lemon pies my favorite desserts. And every sort of a bot that I do in my life is called lemon pie. So like, okay, this thing has to be called lemon pie. But anyway, it was a sort of funny historical accident. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Well, I want that system. I look forward to you making all these things available. Right. First use. Yes. I hate open source and it breaks. I hate doing my expenses so much. I've always hated that is pretty funny because I worked at the New York Times in Bloomberg for a long very many years and their systems are so archaic. And when I did this startup and then started encountering things like yeah, I was like, oh my god, they're like that's great. That's great. That's great. Heavens that I no longer have to toil and all these things, but destroy my soul. No, my ex-during expense report. No, no, and I'm just yeah, I'm just it's like self-defeating. Exactly. I just don't do it. Then. Well, thank you so much for coming in. Thanks for having me all the support. And when we finish this, if you have a few minutes, I want to show you a cool video. Yeah. For sure. Thank you guys are in. All right. Pedro, thank you so much for coming and we will see you guys again soon. Yeah, thanks for having me. Really appreciate it. Thank you. For every podcast is hosted by me, Ashley Vance and/or Kylie Robison or both of us together. It is produced by me and David Nicholson. Our theme song is by James Mercer and John Sortland and the show is edited. Always by thee, John Sortland. Thank you so much to Brex, anyone ventures for all your support. And thank you most of all to everybody for listening, for watching. We love you. Please leave us a like, a review, a subscribe. All those tremendous things. Thank you and we'll see you again.