20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders

Pedro Franceschi is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Brex, the AI-powered spend platform with tens of thousands of customers, including DoorDash, Coinbase, Robinhood and Roblox. Pedro has raised over $1.2BN for the company from the likes of Greenoaks, Ribbit, DST, Bond and YC. The latest reported valuation was $12.3BN. Before Brex, Pedro was the first person to “jailbreak” the iPhone 3G in Brazil and co-founded payments company Pagar.me with Dubugras when he was 15. In three years, Pedro scaled it to over 100 people and US$1.5 billion in transactions processed.

In Today’s Episode with Pedro Franceschi We Discuss:

1. The Challenge is in Your Own Head:

• Why does Pedro believe all founders underestimate their own mental health?

• When was Pedro most anxious/depressed in the Brex journey? Why?

• What have been the single biggest needle movers for increasing his own mental health?

• How does Pedro advise other founders struggling with their own mental health?

2. From a 13-Year-Old Hacker in Brazil to Billionaire in LA:

• How did Pedro come to make $200K on the internet when he was just 12?

• Does Pedro agree that the best founders always started entrepreneurial pursuits young?

• How does Pedro reflect on his own relationship to money today? How has it changed?

• Pedro has famously taken large secondaries, how did that impact his mindset?

• How does Pedro advise other founders and VCs when it comes to secondaries?

3. The Importance of the Idea: What Everyone Misunderstands:

• What does Pedro mean when he says everyone does not appreciate enough how important the idea selection process is? How does he advise founders entering this process?

• Why does Pedro believe it is not that easy for founder to just pivot to a new idea?

• How did YC almost miss out on investing in Brex, now a $12BN company, due to the original idea?

4. Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins:

• How does Pedro feel when I say, “Ramp have gotten ahead on marketing and visibility”?

• Why does Pedro believe that “Ramp is a marketing company”? What does he mean when he says “great products will win over time”?

• Why does Pedro fundamentally disagree with Ramp’s positioning of the best companies focus on saving and their giving away their software for free?

• How does this market play out over time? Winner take all or gains split across several?