Brex co-founder Henrique Dubugras particulars selections behind pivots, layoffs, going distant • TechCrunch

It’s been an eventful yr for fintech Brex.

The yr started with affirmation that the startup had raised $300 million at a $12.3 billion valuation. In April, the corporate introduced a shift in technique — a brand new emphasis on software program and the enterprise. By June, it despatched shock waves within the startup world when it introduced it could now not serve small companies funded outdoors the enterprise capital construction. Extra not too long ago, it laid off 11% of its employees.

One of many buzziest fintechs on the market, Brex is thought for greater than its product choices. Its charismatic co-founders and teenage hackers Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi dropped out of Stanford to start out the corporate as a part of Y Combinator of their early 20s. Years later, newer startups in YC cohorts nonetheless tout themselves because the “Brex for X.”

At TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, I sat down with a refreshingly candid Dubugras and Anu Hariharan, YC’s managing director for continuity and an early Brex investor, to reveal the context round this whirlwind of a yr. The interview has been edited for readability and brevity.

Azevedo: Inform us about once you first began Brex. I imagine you had been in your early 20s?

Dubugras: I used to be born and raised in Brazil, and out of highschool, I began a funds enterprise in Brazil that did cost processing, so type of like a Stripe of Brazil. After promoting that firm, I moved to the U.S. to go to school after which dropped out to start out Brex.

The primary concept that we obtained into YC wasn’t really in fintech. It was a VR firm. After we bought the final firm, we had been bored with fintech. We’re like, “All these banks and regulators are so sophisticated. You recognize, we’re now in Silicon Valley. We need to do one thing on the bleeding fringe of know-how.” So VR appeared prefer it. However a couple of weeks into YC, we realized that we had no clue what we had been doing and determined to pivot into Brex.

In Brex, the primary worth proposition was after we realized that there have been all these startups that had raised thousands and thousands of {dollars} and couldn’t get a company card. We had been like, “That makes completely no sense. How are you going to have raised 3, 4 or 5 million {dollars} and nonetheless not have the ability to get a company card? So you already know, that’s what we determined to do early on.”

So the final time you had been at Disrupt was three years in the past once you had been launching Brex Money. Round that point, you had billboards everywhere in the metropolis — you couldn’t move a bus cease with out seeing Brex on a billboard. You had been aggressively advertising and marketing to startups in type of an old-school manner. However then earlier this yr, you had a shift in technique: You introduced that Brex was making a push into software program and that you simply had been going to be specializing in the enterprise. After which this summer time, you talked about now not working with SMBs and non-professionally-funded startups. Now this stunned — and upset — lots of people. What led to this determination of such a change in your technique?