Brex founder Pedro Franceschi on the one question CEOs should constantly ask themselves

So I spoke to Anu before the show and she said a very specific quote, which was, "Find the one bottleneck that's throttling speed and unlock it." Yeah. How would you advise other founders when it comes to this statement?

Yeah, so I think it's like very simple. I think it all starts by asking, hey, what's limiting your rate of growth right now? And people say, oh, there's many things. There's not. By definition, there's only one thing in any system. Limits the rate of progress for the whole system. It's called the bottleneck. And by the way, like, people should read Toyota Production Systems. It's like the best book on all of this, like lean manufacturing. I love these things. And once you find that bottleneck, the highest leverage thing you can do is increase the throughput of the bottleneck more than anything else in the system you could change. If you could change only one thing, it's changing the rate of progress in the bottleneck.

What does that mean, the rate of progress in the bottleneck?

Just So for example, like you can ask yourself, well, like, hey, what is my bottleneck right now? And my bottleneck could be, well, I don't have, for example, Brex in 2021, our bottleneck was we didn't have an enterprise product, right? So we were limited in the kinds of customers we could serve because the reality is as customers matured and got to a certain scale, Brex, the product that we had back then, didn't scale for them anymore. So when you look into the numbers and you look into where the growth of the business would come from and you look at like how we retain customers throughout their whole lifetime, That was like a really big pain point. As time passed, you're like, what is that one thing that can change the trajectory of the business? And the one thing is building an enterprise product because if you don't have an enterprise product, there's nothing you can do. You can have the best sales team, you can have the best marketing, you can have the best everything, but if the product is not truly great, you can't unlock the next growth phases of the company. So what I did back then is I just said, hey, I'm going to spend 70% of my time building that product. And I just delegated everything else of day-to-day management of the company to my team. And I just spent 60, 70% of my time writing APIs of engineers on how would the enterprise product work, how would the platform that we're building would work, how would all that come to place? And it took us 8, a year to get something that worked. And that's how, you know, ultimately we closed customers like DoorDash, like Coinbase, like Robinhood, you know, like all these large enterprise customers that would not have traditionally come to Brex. But because we were so obsessed over like making the bottleneck faster and making the bottleneck like just not be a bottleneck anymore. And I think the reason this is meaningful is because As you do that, you can allocate and marshal a disproportionate amount of resources into that bottleneck. So I can say, well, I know that the highest leverage use of my time as the founder and the CEO is to spend time making that one thing go faster. And I think there is this thing where a lot of anxiety building a company comes from like what truly matters. Like what is the one thing that if I spend time on and not hedging, not like spreading across like 4 or 5 different priorities, What is the one thing that really, really will move the needle? And I think when you identify this thing and you just put a lot of time there, there's this almost zen state, very liberating, where you can just focus entirely on one thing.