From Techcrunch:
Since fintech startup Brex’s inception in 2017, its two co-founders Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi have run the company as co-CEOs.
But starting today, the pair told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview, the San Francisco-based corporate credit card and expense management company is shifting to a more traditional — and what they say should be a more agile — model of just one CEO at the helm. Franceschi will become the sole CEO while Dubugras will become chairman of Brex’s board.
In an in-depth conversation, the two co-founders gave us a peek into what the new structure will look like, the company’s current state of finances and how it has managed to reduce its cash burn.
The close friends started working together as co-founders of another company, Brazilian payment processing startup Pagar.me, in 2012 at the wee age of 16. (That company ended up getting acquired by Stone Pagamentos for “tens of millions of dollars” — before the two had even gone to college.) While both founders could code, they quickly realized that Franceschi was the “better coder.” Rather than having one person manage a part of the organization like product and engineering and the other one manage sales and marketing, they decided to split their duties as external and internal co-CEOs (a decision they touched on in this episode of the Found podcast last year).
The model worked so well at that company, they said, that they decided to employ the same strategy when they founded Brex after dropping out of Stanford to participate in the YC Winter 2017 cohort.
Ups and downs
The once high-flying company has been on a roller-coaster ride in recent years. Two years ago, it was valued at $12.3 billion after raising $300 million and had poached former Meta exec Karandeep Anand to serve as its chief product officer after having led Meta’s business products group. (He was then named the first president of the company in November of 2023.)
In January, Brex laid off 282 people, or about 20% of its staff. That was after an October 2022 layoff of 136 people, or 11% of its staff, across all departments as part of a restructuring. Today, it has 1,000 workers.
There’s also been a lot of shuffling among Brex’s management. Sam Blond left his role as chief revenue officer in 2022 to join Founders Fund (a position he departed in March). Earlier this year, Brex announced that its COO,
Michael Tannenbaum, was transitioning from his role to become a board member. At that time, Camilla Morais, who was SVP of global operations, was promoted to COO. And it was announced that Cosmin Nicolaescu was transitioning from his role as CTO to an adviser position this summer.
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