You’re reading an interview from HackerNoon’s Startup Founder Interview Series! Would you like to take a stab at answering some of these questions? The link for the template is HERE.
1. What is your company in 2–5 words?
The modern spend platform.
2. Why is now the time for your company to exist?
We originally got our start when we saw no one in our YC cohort could get a corporate card. We realized that the payments industry needed to be shaken up – so we pivoted from our original idea and launched Brex to help founders scale in 2017.
From there, we realized just how much opportunity existed when it came to how companies manage their spend. Existing tools for planning, spending, and tracking company dollars were antiquated and disconnected, leading to tedious processes for founders and finance teams.
A fundamental shift was required. That inspired our effort to go beyond just a corporate card and to build an entire platform from the ground up that unified financial services and software, allowing money movement and spend controls to coexist.
This need to optimize spend is even more relevant in today’s macroeconomic environment, where founders and finance teams are being asked to maximize the ROI of every dollar. We help ensure that they’re equipped to spend smarter and accordingly grow faster.
3. What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?
We’ve got a team of builders who are willing to operate with the utmost intensity to build a generational company that exceeds the expectations of our customers. We talk often at Brex about breaking trade-offs between speed and quality. We need to move fast to bring the future we imagine forward, but we never cut corners in that journey. I am insanely proud of how the team approaches this every day, keeping an eye on the big picture but always obsessing about the details.
The other thing worth noting is that Brex exists at the intersection of financial services and software, and we’ve got an incredible team of experts from both domains (capital markets <> engineers) charting our path forward. The result is that we’ve got the most advanced global capabilities and payment rails in the market, and we’re consistently raising the bar in every product release to make our offering easy to use for smaller companies and customizable at scale for our enterprise customers.
4. If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?
I truly can’t imagine not building Brex – it is so core to who I am.
5. At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your metrics?
We look at revenue growth driven by both new customer acquisition and net revenue retention. We also set targets around burn rate, sales efficiency, and CAC paybacks with the goal of 2025 being the last year that Brex burns money.
Beyond the hard metrics, it is incredibly important to us that our platform can scale. Brex is the only player that can credibly serve companies at every stage of growth, from YC founders starting out to trillion-dollar public companies. We will continue to prioritize this as a core competency – success is serving this wide range of customers for years to come.
6. In a few sentences, what do you offer to whom?
Brex offers a breadth of products to help businesses spend smarter and make every dollar count including the world’s smartest corporate card with intuitive expense management, banking, bill pay, accounting automation, travel, and more.
7. What’s most exciting about your traction to date?
We’ve been able to empower companies to make smarter spending decisions at every stage of growth—from startups, to mid-size companies, all the way up to leading, global enterprises like Anthropic, Arm, Robinhood, ServiceTitan, Wiz, and more. We’ve seen companies that began with just two people grow into 1,000+ employee enterprises, and Brex has been there with them every step of the way. It’s incredibly rewarding to see how Brex has supported them in scaling efficiently and effectively. With Brex, our customers are saving 169,000 hours per month on expense, documentation, and accounting and customers have a 94% employee compliance rate, compared to the industry standard of 70%.
But it’s not just about providing tools; it’s about being a true strategic partner and helping them fuel their exponential growth. That’s the part that truly excites us.
8. Where do you think your growth will be next year?
2024 was a year of sharp improvement at Brex. Revenue growth accelerated almost 3x this year, net revenue retention is up more than 15 points, while the burn rate is down almost 70%. In 2025, we will continue to compound the momentum built this year, growing faster than 2024 and being the last year in which we burn money — an important milestone to our future IPO. We will also continue to raise the bar on product quality and innovation, while increasing the pace of customer acquisition with healthy unit economics at scale.
9. Tell us about your first paying customer and revenue expectations over the next year.
Scale AI was Brex’s first customer. I vividly remember Henrique, my co-founder, and I walking to their office and physically handing Alex their Brex card. It’s a moment I’ll never forget.
10. What’s your biggest threat?
Focus. The central tension of building a company is obsessing over outcomes, but at the same time, not caring about them at all. Ironically, the more you let go of the outcomes and focus on putting out great work, the more the outcomes come. It’s the old adage: the score takes care of itself. All we need to do is to put great work in front of customers, and the score will take care of itself.
This startup founder interview template is based on HackerNoon Founder & CEO David Smooke’s ten questions for startup founders.
