He Hacked Finance And Is Now Building An AI CEO - EP 63 Pedro Franceschi

**Ashlee Vance** (0:00)
Today's guest is a coding and entrepreneurial prodigy. He is Pedro Franceschi, the CEO and co-founder of Brex. The headlines on his life story are quite remarkable. He grew up in Brazil, taught himself to code as a eight or nine year old. By the time he was a teenager, he was hacking the iPhone. He was getting legal notices from Apple, asking him to stop hacking the iPhone. He was starting a number of businesses where he made hundreds of thousands of dollars, while all the rest of his compatriots were on the beach in Rio de Janeiro or playing soccer. Pedro was coding away, creating these companies. He has some very deep sadness in his childhood. His father got cancer and passed away when Pedro was just eight. That left his mother to raise Pedro and his sibling as a single mother. She had some unconventional approaches to raising Pedro, which we get into in the show. Obviously, we get into Brex, which has been this just superstar of modern financial tech. They were just acquired by Capital One for $5.15 billion. We speak about this on the episode we talk about. Pedro is really open about the ups and downs running this business. His own personal ups and down struggles with mental health. He writes about these things. He talks about them in the show. Just he's 29 years old, so this dude has lived quite a juggernaut of a life so far. These days, he's using AI agents in what I find imaginative and comical and inspirational ways. He's got a team of AI agents running his life. We speak about all that. So I should note, Brex is the flagship sponsor of this podcast and our video series. As such, we are deeply journalistically conflicted in this episode. Nonetheless, I think it's a good listen, and he has a fascinating story to tell. This is Ashlee Vance. You're listening to the Core Memory Podcast, and off we go.
Pedro, thank you so much for coming in.

**Pedro Franceschi** (2:47)
Thanks for having me.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:48)
You are your royalty in these parts. You guys have been such amazing supporters of everything.

**Pedro Franceschi** (2:55)
Oh, thank you.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:55)
For what you've been doing.

**Pedro Franceschi** (2:56)
Very glad to help, we're big fans.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:58)
I feel extra pressure doing this one. You, at the end of last year, you got married. You just were acquired for $5.1 billion, and now you're on the Core Memory podcast. It's all happening.

**Pedro Franceschi** (3:12)
It's all happening. It's really all happening.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:17)
I wanted to, for people to get to know you a little bit. I mean, look, I cover all kinds of inventors, startup founders, and so some stories I see repeating a little bit, and there's echoes of that in some of your biography. I'm just going to read off a little list here for people super quick, and then dive into a couple of these things. But if you throw your name into Claude or ChatGPT and ask for a quick background, it's like ages eight to nine, teaches himself to code entirely via Google, no formal training. Age 11 begins jailbreaking iPhones and iPods. Age 12 starts creating apps, you're selling apps to friends at school. Age 15 to 16, well, then this is when you start to your journey heading towards Brex one day, meeting your friend, Enrique.
But some of this is familiar. I mean, it reminded me a lot of George Hotz who I've written about.

**Pedro Franceschi** (4:21)
Oh, in OE?

**Ashlee Vance** (4:22)
Yeah, he's like this teenage hacker. He was busting it.

**Pedro Franceschi** (4:25)
We used to be IRC buddies back in the day. Okay.

**Ashlee Vance** (4:28)
He was getting into the Playstations. But I mean, even among these people I've covered, quite exceptional, especially running, money-making businesses as a kid. There's some of this in the things that I read, but tell me, were you just always, you hit upon a computer and it just makes sense to you?

**Pedro Franceschi** (4:53)
Yeah. I think the biggest luck of my life was I found out what I loved doing when I was eight or nine. Most people don't have that luck, but I did.
I grew up in Brazil. I'm from Rio originally, and growing up, I lost my dad when I was eight, and he was a big nerd and used to spend a lot of time in the computer. We had a computer at home, which was relatively rare back in Brazil, and that somehow was something that was around my life since the beginning. I would say when I was eight or nine, I just had this very deep curiosity to understand how the computer worked. Then I opened it up one day and I saw there wasn't anything interesting inside the computer. So I thought, well, there's something else going on here that makes this actually be so magical and so amazing, and I realized it was software. Then as a kid in Brazil, I wasn't really exposed to software engineering in any capacity, but the Internet existed and the Internet is this amazing thing. That allowed people like me to learn something that I would never be able to learn otherwise. So I started Googling how to code and started learning C and C++ back when I was nine, and learning that in English at the same time made it a little bit more challenging. C isn't a particularly friendly language, but it's all the resources that I found back then in 2004 or 2005 So that was the backdrop of how I started coding.