Larissa Rocha, Brex's first employee, discusses how founders Pedro and Henrique, two self-taught Brazilian engineers, built the company by starting quickly instead of waiting for a perfect idea. They launched their first customers in June 2017, publicly in July 2018, and initially released the Brex card without rewards, adding them five to six months later.
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Sure, they wanted to do something super cool, right? But they never really waited for the perfect idea. They arrived at a great idea by just starting to do something, which is so important because then you're testing it out, you're talking to people, you're understanding if that's something people even want, and then you're polishing your idea to what will eventually become a successful company.
When we meet companies, and we probably meet like hundreds of month, probably between the 4 of us. Behind the scenes after the meeting, one of the things that we see the most is we love the idea, but we're not sure it's the right team. Or we sometimes think, I'm not sure they understand the problem at all. Or I just— there's just no, like you said, founder-market fit. And it's interesting because the people we meet are almost always incredibly smart. But like you said, the maturity to know that, hey, we may not be the people to solve this problem, or to say, I'm going to spend some time and understand what problems are interesting for us to solve. And I feel like these seem so simple when you know it, but these are not really steps a lot of founders take because there's this energy and excitement to start something. And I'm sure in your time here, you've met a lot of very young founders as well. What do you think differentiates the ones with the maturity to take a step back and say, hey, I'm not the right person to solve this problem?
You have to start somewhere. So the story, like, how did 2 16-year-olds in Brazil got into payments? It's a pretty complex thing for it to become your passion when you're 16. And they both, both Henrique and Pedro, they have interesting stories. Enrique was a self-taught engineer, computer engineer, because he wanted to play this game called Ragnarok. Any players of Ragnarok here? No, I think it's mostly a Brazilian thing. And he really wanted to play this game and his mom wouldn't pay for it. So he had to learn how to code so he could play for free. And Pedro was an Apple aficionado since he was really young. And he, you know, his dad had these Apple computers that was very, very rare in Brazil at the time. And he was just a huge fan. And he started jailbreaking the iPhone, right? Especially a long time ago, the iPhone would have this thing where it didn't work in other countries, so you had to do some stuff with it. And he jailbroke the iPhone, did the jailbreak of the iPhone. And when the new iPhone came up and it was kind of like new and extremely hard to do that, he was the first one in the world to jailbreak the iPhone 4. So that's, you know, he was 12 at the time. So he became sort of known for that. And one year later, he got Siri, like the Apple Siri, not Draper Siri. He got the Apple Siri to speak the first language outside of English, which was Portuguese, because he hacked Siri to speak Portuguese. So he got some angry papers from Apple, but made a name for himself. And they both were sort of like self-taught engineers, and eventually they found each other on Twitter. And they had this thing in common where, sure, they wanted to do something super cool, right? But they never really waited for the perfect idea. They arrived at a great idea by just starting to do something, which is so important because then you're testing it out, you're talking to people, you're understanding if that's something people even want, and then you're polishing your idea to what will eventually become a successful company. Enrique, he participated on this hackathon with an idea. It was Tinder, so an online dating app, But instead of geolocation like Tinder does, it used Facebook friends. So it would match you with your Facebook friends. And he had this idea to monetize the app, which was in order to find out who the match is, you have to pay $1 or something. And when it came time to implement that, he realized that Online payment processors in Brazil were pretty bad. He couldn't really get one to work well. And then he realized that it was a much broader market, a much larger market, and a problem that he could solve. So that's how they first got into payments at the time. So the founders who will pivoting and meeting with a bunch of people and just Starting with something, even if you don't feel it's the perfect idea, is a much better way to get to where you want to be than to just wait and design and think until you think it's perfect in your head.
So perfectionism is sometimes like, you know, they say done is better than perfect and perfect is the enemy of good. But what about intellectual honesty, right? Sometimes you just have to face it and say, hey, this is not working.
Exactly.
Very few people do that. Or you need someone who will say to you, you know what, I really respect you, but you're kind of not really on track to success. And that this product isn't working, we need to do something else. So are the founders both very, like, you know, just very realistic like that? Or is it just a dynamic that you guys built where you could say to each other, hey, this is not working, we need to regroup?
No, 100%. If something's not working, we'd much rather fail faster and just move on to the next thing. So we definitely have that ideology at Brex. And that comes with also measuring. Measuring what you're doing, it's really, really important because data speaks louder than intuition.
So when it was just the 3 of you, and, you know, if one person was really wedded to one idea, one way of doing things, what frameworks did you use to test if something was working? Was it just data? Is it that all of you had a very data-first mindset? Or, or were there like, were you staging an intervention and saying, hey, this is not working, we need to fix this?
Yeah, great question. So the Brax public launch is known to be, which was July 19th, 2018. But our first customer, our first handful of customers happened much earlier, happened in June 2017. Because there is this saying that we believe in a lot, which is, if you are not embarrassed of the first version of your product, you launched too late.
Exactly.
And so, you know, when we first launched Brex, it was called Vyond. because it was from the other company, Vision Beyond, right, the VR company. It was super simple. It was like this blue, very cheap-looking card.
And—
but it got us a long way because all of the theories we had or notions we thought we had of what founders seek and need around financial services, a lot of them got confirmed, but a lot of them got disproved once we actually got real people to use it. use the card. So we would always solve it by just letting the market decide.
What's an example of, say, a feature you built, and did you get feedback? How did you decide, okay, no, this is not working?
So, like, one example is we were a little hesitant to launch without rewards, right? Because when you think about a a credit card, rewards to a lot of people are very important. And so to launch without that was something that we were considering whether it was going to be the right thing or not. But at the same time, to build a robust rewards program, it would take a long time and a lot of thought for us to understand what matters to these founders, etc. So, you know, our very first, we actually started off the card without rewards, and we did the public launch without rewards, because we understood that no personal guarantees and no security deposits, and instant signup like we had, you didn't have to go to the branch, you could have just in 10 minutes sign up, have your card ready to go, was in itself a strong enough value prop that we would get the traction we needed. to then build something more robust down the line, which is, you know, we then launched rewards around 5, 6 months after the public launch, along with our Series C at the time.
