#82 - Henrique Dubugras of Brex and Anu Hariharan

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast.
Today's episode is with Henrique Dubugras and Anu Hariharan.
Anu's a partner here at YC, and Henrique is the co-founder of Brex. Brex provides corporate credit cards for startups. And they went through YC in the winter 2017 batch and just closed their Series B, which was led by YC Continuity. So in addition to discussing how the Brex team built out their service, Anu and Henrique also cover the specifics of what it takes to build a fintech startup in 2018 And Henrique shares advice for young founders because he started his first company at 16 All right, here we go.

**Anu Hariharan** (0:41)
Hi everyone. I'm Anu, a partner at YC Continuity, and we have Henrique here, who is the founder of Brex, which was a YC winter 17 company.
The exciting news about Brex is they're actually launching soon, and they offer corporate credit cards. They're basically redefining how corporate credit cards work for startups. So we're very excited to have Henrique here. Henrique, let's talk a little bit about your background. We obviously at YC have known you for a very long time, both you and Pedro.
And you guys started your first FinTech startup when you were at the ages of 15 and 16, which is not something we see every day. So can you tell us a little bit about what was the first company you founded, and then how did you find your path to Y Combinator?

**Henrique Dubugras** (1:29)
Yeah, for sure. So first, thanks for having me here.
And so Pedro and I, we both started coding pretty early. I think that was super helpful. I think that I was a little bit lucky.

**Anu Hariharan** (1:44)
How early was that?

**Henrique Dubugras** (1:45)
So I started when I was 12, because there was this game I wanted to play. It was like a paid game, and my parents didn't want to pay it for me, and I figured if I learned how to code, I could play it for free.
And Pedro, nobody knows how he started coding, but he started coding when he was like nine years old. And then during our teenage years, we did a lot of interesting things. So I participated in building this emulator for this game, and I learned a lot how to code it because of that, and I built a version of that game. Pedro, on the other hand, when he was 12, he found the first jailbreak for the iPhone 3G, which got a lot of attention. And so we had during our teenage years a bunch of experiences already in tech that led us to believe it's possible to start a company. So for me, it was that I was working at this startup, and the founder, I thought I was a really cool guy, and my thought was if he can do it, I can do it too. And then I tried to start an education company, and that didn't work out. And then I met Pedro in the end of 2012, basically fighting on Twitter, programming text editors, Vim versus Emacs. And I was Vim, he was Emacs, and I won.
And we basically became super friends and decided to start a company together, which was PugArme. PugArme was like a payment processor, an online payment processor down in Brazil. I think the comparables here would be like something like Stripe or Braintree or WePay or like those kind of companies. And we grew that company from, to a pretty reasonable size. So it was like a really good experience.

**Anu Hariharan** (3:35)
And you raised only $300,000.

**Henrique Dubugras** (3:37)
Yeah, it wasn't by option that much at that point. So we were 15 and 16 when we started a company. So it's not like a lot of people in Brazil were willing to give us much more than that.
And then after we raised the money, we were like, oh, this is so much money. Like we can do whatever we want with this. And we were lucky that payments in Brazil, it's in terms of margin, a better business than most of the world. So we were able to have a profitable company since I think the end of the first year.
And that was super helpful because then we just grew with our own profits. We didn't have the need to fundraise and profits solve a lot of problems if you can have them.

**Anu Hariharan** (4:20)
That's true. And you sold the company four years later when your team size was around 100

**Henrique Dubugras** (4:25)
Yeah, so we grew the company, I feel the stats for the time we sold it. We're doing a little bit over 1.5 billion in transaction volume. We had, I think, a little bit over 100 people, I think 110, 115, something like that.