91: Brex CEO Henrique Dubugras - the best CEOs are extremely authentic to themselves

Henrique and his co-founder, Pedro, started their entrepreneurial journey at 16 when they started pagar.me. In the process of doing so, they learned a ton about what product market fit looks like and how difficult it is to run a profitable business.    Henrique and Pedro went on to stumble on quite the market opportunity: Why was it that startups were raising millions of dollars from VC funds but then struggling to get a corporate credit card with a $30,000 credit line? In short, they identified an underserved market with tons of latent demand and very little actual credit risk. These companies may have been considered ‘risky’, but in reality, they were very credit-worthy.    5 years and change later, Brex has raised over $1.5Bn, employees well over 1,200 people, and is a market leader in the corporate credit card and spend management space.    Henrique joins Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built By Humans podcast as they discuss how to design processes that scale with your company, the importance of focus, and why being extremely authentic is the key to being an effective leader. Here are some key takeaways from the conversation: The best CEOs are extremely authentic to themselves and build a team of people around them that allow them to be the best version of themselves.  Antiquated industry infrastructure can yield fantastic opportunities for disruption. In Brex’s case, banking infrastructure prevented incumbents from underwriting customers daily which turned out to be a key differentiator for Brex.  Calculate the true cost of a new process before implementing it. Many processes make the lives of 99% of your people worse all in the name of preventing the 1% of times where things go wrong.  A CEOs job is to balance risk with speed and decide what types of risks they are willing to take on in order to move faster.   Doubling headcount doesn’t mean double the output. Many times leadership bandwidth is the biggest bottleneck to productivity.  Focus is imperative. There will always be many strategic directions that have merit and value to your company but it’s important to be okay ceding some to competitors in the name of doubling down on your core business.