This content was created by Tim Draper. This content was uploaded by Tim Draper. This excerpt is from a YouTube interview titled "BREX's Bay Area Billboards | Larissa Rocha, First Employee at BREX" (published 2020-05-22). It captures a discussion between Larissa Rocha (an early Brex employee) and an interviewer (labeled SPEAKER B) about Brex's growth and marketing strategy — in particular their aggressive Bay Area billboard and transit ad campaign around the company’s public launch in July 2018. Larissa describes why billboards worked in the Bay Area, how they measured impact (an open "how did you hear about Brex?" field in the application), the outsized ROI versus online ads, and credits Chief Sales Officer Sam Blonde with proposing the billboard approach.
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We still today, we have a very aggressive billboard campaign. Like, we get every single billboard that we can, and bus stops. If you pay attention, even the airport, we have the Brack signs, et cetera, to make sure it's the first thing you see when you land in San Francisco. Because in the Bay Area, you either are working at a startup, or you know someone who works at a startup. This wouldn't work as well in New York, for example.
What was the milestone at which— From everything I've heard, you strike me as a company that's extremely deliberate and intentional about everything you build and do. What was the milestone that you hit where you were like, okay, now we're in expansion mode, now we're going to explode and grow as fast as possible? Or was that from day one?
That was— no, we were growing slow in the beginning because we wanted to grow right, understand what we needed to launch next. As I said, we wanted to control growth and understand what were the needs, what features should come after that. So we were experimental. Then we had these important partnerships, as I said, and then at that time we were ready for a slightly more constant volume. Then we were growing a lot even before the public launch. Then we came to a point where we weren't limiting growth anymore and companies were really jumping in the boat just because we didn't require a personal guarantee. And then when we were like, okay, now it's very real, was on our public launch 2018. Because before then, Brex wasn't even searchable. You couldn't even search Brex online. You could, but then Brexit would come up, not our company. And that day, July 19th, 2018, we had tons of billboards. We got— and people thought that was so expensive to get every single billboard in the city, but it actually wasn't. It's like 1/10 of what people think they costed. And it made a huge difference for us because The Bay Area is highly concentrated with our customer base, so it was super, super effective for us. For you to have an idea, it had a 3 times higher ROI than online ads that we were paying for at the time. And the way that we were measuring that was very simple. We had an open field in the application, how did you hear about Brex? And billboards just kept coming up. And at that time, we were in the news, we launched, we were at TechCrunch, we were at You know, everywhere. And so that's when, okay, now it's real. That's when it felt very real.
You know, again, that is so not intuitive. I've lived here 3 years in the Bay Area, and there was a moment when Brex was everywhere. And I remember having conversations with people. I knew of Brex because you guys had graduated YC, and you weren't— you were about a year old at that point. And we were all thinking, Why are they taking billboards out? It seems so non-intuitive. I've never seen any company do that. Maybe some public companies, B2B software companies on the 101, but how did you arrive at that? Again, it was very unexpected and surprising.
Yeah, so for context, for people who might be a little confused, we still today, we have a very aggressive billboard campaign. We get every single billboard that we can and bus stops. If you pay attention, even the airport, we have the, Brex signs and etc. Make sure it's the first thing you see when you land in San Francisco. And we first did that on our public launch. We covered the city with billboards that just said the first corporate card for startups. Very simple. And then brex.com. And the idea, and you know, it was a pretty good thing for us because in the Bay Area you either are working at a startup or you know someone who works at a startup. This wouldn't work as well in New York, for example, where it's a lot more diverse and random and distributed, but here it worked really, really well. The way we arrived at the idea was our Chief Sales Officer, Sam Blonde, who actually also fits that profile. He scaled sales at a company called Zenefits, and they had a very smart billboard strategy, and he was the one who said, guys, we should also do billboards, and we were all very skeptical because I think today we place an extra weight on, or we have this bias towards wanting to measure ROI exactly, and And with billboards, it's really hard to do, so you think, oh, it's not a good idea. How do we know that it's working out? But we found a way, and we continued to do that because it worked really well. But it was his idea.
There's a pattern of you guys doing things that are not— it may not seem intuitive, may not be what's expected, and then you see outsized returns and outsized success from it. So I really love that.
