Henrique Dubugras - Building the Financial Center of Gravity – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 35]

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
This episode of Founder's Field Guide is brought to you by Dell Technologies. This month is Small Business Month, and Dell Technologies and Windows are celebrating your unstoppable drive. Save up to 45% on powerful PCs with Windows 10 Pro to work from anywhere, plus top monitors and docs for the ultimate business setup, all with easy financing options through Dell Financial Services. Speak to a Dell Technologies advisor who can help you find the right business tech, server, storage and cloud solutions at 877-ASK-DELL. That's 877-ASK-DELL for small business month savings.
As you listen to Founder's Field Guide and learn from the best founders and operators about building great businesses, make sure you have the best tools to help grow your business today. This episode of Founder's Field Guide is brought to you by 8 Sleep. 8 Sleep's new Pod Pro cover is the easiest and fastest way to sleep at your perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced solution on the market. Simply add the Pod Pro cover to your current mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55 degrees or as hot as 110 degrees. It also splits your bed in half so your partner can choose a totally different temperature.
I was so impressed after using 8 Sleep that I became an investor. To embrace the future of sleep and get $150 off your new mattress, go to 8sleep.com/patrick or use the code PATRICK.
Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Founder's Field Guide. Founder's Field Guide is a series of conversations with founders, CEOs and operators building great businesses. I believe we are all builders in our own way and this series is dedicated to stories and lessons from builders of all types. Founder's Field Guide is part of the Colossus family of podcasts and you can access all of our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes and resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:49)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:14)
My guest today is Henrique Dubugras, co-founder and CEO of Brex, an all-in-one finance account for businesses. Brex recently raised funding at a valuation of over $7 billion, despite being founded only four years ago. In our conversation, we cover Brex's transition from a credit card for startups to the central account for businesses, why building that central account was orders of magnitude more difficult than expected, and the difference between building a business in Brazil and the US. We also discussed Henrique's long-term horizon for building Brex, and how that impacts his decision-making for the business.
Please enjoy my conversation with Henrique Dubugras.
I was thinking about where to begin this conversation. I'm enamored by this idea I've thought of recently that all the best ideas come when you're making things, not thinking about things. And I think Brex is a good example of this, where you stumbled upon a frustration or a problem that has now led to this fascinating business. And I'm really curious how you would describe the B2B financial system when you stumbled upon this frustration. Like what was the state of the system? What did it feel like? And that'll be a good excuse to then talk through the sequence of what you've built so far.

**Henrique Dubugras** (3:24)
When Pedro and I started our first company, Pagarmum, I would say that that was pretty like stumbled. We were trying to think of a startup idea and we worked at a payments company. I had had a bad experience with payments, so we decided let's start a payments company. And that's exactly how it went.
And not a lot of thought behind it. I think we were lucky because especially in this is 2013, it's a great growing market anywhere in the world, in the US and in Brazil as well, we were doing it. And for three and a half years, we were serving B2B financial services to businesses. And when we sold the company, we got to the US, we tried to like pivot out of it and do something else in FinTech. Our head kept going back to B2B financial services. It's kind of the thing we were doing for a long time and the US seemed like a very competitive place. So we just wanted to do that.
So when we started Brex, it was a little bit more, I would say plans than when we started our first company.