The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:00:00 · Brendan Foody
[00:00:00] S0: We were already at a 9 figure revenue run rate, and the company quadrupled since the the scale acquisition. We scaled the business from 1 to 500,000,000 in revenue run rate in the last seventeen months, which is the fastest revenue growth of all time, one month faster than Cursor's time from one to 500. We have the demand to, like, double overnight if we can meet capacity. RL environments will subsume the entire economy.
00:00:29 · Harry Stebbings
[00:00:29] S1: This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and today we have the fastest growing company in history on the show. So they've scaled revenue from 1,000,000 to 500,000,000 in just seventeen months. Their business has quadrupled since scale was acquired. This is an insane story, and I'm thrilled to welcome Brandon Fudi, co founder and CEO of Makor to the hot seat. Now I did not pull any punches in this show. Brandon was amazing answering some very direct questions here. This one was fantastic. But before we dive into the show today, I love seeing the team come together to make this show happen. What I don't love is trying to keep track of all the information, the data, and the projects that we're working on across dozens of platforms, products, and tools. That's why we use Coda, the all in one collaborative workspace that's helped 50,000 teams all over the world get on the same page. Offering the flexibility of docs with the structure of spreadsheets, Coda facilitates deeper teamwork and quicker creativity. And their turnkey AI solution, the intelligence of Coda Brain, is a game changer. Powered by Grammarly, Coda is entering a new phase of innovation and expansion aiming to redefine productivity for the AI era. Whether you're a start up looking to organize the chaos while staying nimble or an enterprise organization looking for better alignment, Coda matches your working style. Its seamless workspace connects to hundreds of your favorite tools, including Salesforce, Jira, Asana, and Figma, helping your teams transform their rituals and do more faster. Head over to coda.io/20vc right now and get six months off the team plan for startups for free. That's coda, coda.io/20vc, and get six months off the team plan for free. Coda.io/20 vc. And talking about precision, that's exactly what Brex brings to your finances. So when Brex was founded, it wasn't just about creating another financial product. It was about solving the really gritty challenges that founders face daily. Let's be honest, building something from the ground up is hard enough without dealing with clunky outdated banks that pile on fees and leave your cash idle. Brex is different. It's the financial stack that scales with you no matter where you are in your journey. From corporate cards to maximizing your runway to earning yield on your cash.
00:02:52 · Harry Stebbings
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00:04:31 · Harry Stebbings, Brendan Foody
[00:04:31] S2: You have now arrived at your destination. Brandon, dude, I've been so looking forward to this. I just had the best chat to Victor who gave me the best intel, so you should be really quite nervous at this point. But thank you for joining me. [00:04:43] S0: Thank you for having me on. I'm I'm not sure what to expect with that, but I'm excited to jump in. [00:04:49] S2: I think mothers are the most important things in the world. And Victor told me that I had to start with your ability to sell early and why your mother was nervous about it. Can we just start there?
00:05:01 · Brendan Foody
[00:05:01] S0: Absolutely. So I had a dozen different side hustles when I was growing up selling things in one form or another. But one of my favorites is that in eighth grade, I love selling donuts where I saw that Safeway was selling donuts for $5 a dozen. And so I would buy Safeway donuts, I would bike to my middle school and sell them for $2 each. And I saw it was working. So I wanted to scale it up. So I asked my mom to drive me to Safeway, she said that she didn't want any giveaways. So she would charge me $20 to drive me in her minivan to Safeway buy 10 dozen donuts, go to my middle school sell them for $2 each. I had all sorts of things happen where competition popped up selling Chuck's donuts, which if people aren't familiar, has like a $1 cost basis, but they're higher quality donuts. And so I dropped my prices to $1 for two weeks to run them out of business because I knew that middle schoolers would care more about price as the comparative advantage. I had my principal called me into their office to try to shut down my donut stand, saying that, you know, I wasn't allowed to sell food on school campus. And so I moved my donut stand 20 feet over off of school campus so that they couldn't police me, so to speak. And tying back to your question, Harry, after my mom saw all of this when I was in eighth grade, she was very nervous that I would start selling drugs, right? Because it's like, you know, small jump from donuts to drugs. And so she insisted that while I'm not Catholic, I should go to Catholic high school to make sure that I stayed in touch with my values and and met my cofounders there. So I guess she was right all along.
00:06:38 · Harry Stebbings, Harry Stebbings, Brendan Foody
[00:06:38] S2: Was that actually why she sent you [00:06:40] S1: to Catholic high school? Because she [00:06:41] S2: wanted you on the straight and narrow? [00:06:43] S0: That was exactly why. Because I'd gone to public school through eighth grade. My siblings had all gone to public school all the way till college. But the the primary motivation was that she didn't want me to get into trouble. [00:06:53] S2: As a principal, you're just... You're the child that just pisses you off no end, aren't you? [00:06:57] S1: You're like the no [00:06:58] S2: adult who, like, moves [00:06:59] S1: it just outside the boundaries. Can I ask, Brendan, did you always know you'd be successful? And what I mean by that [00:07:04] S2: is very specifically, when I interview the best founders, they have a duality, which is they have this superiority complex. They think that they are better than everyone. They don't admit it because it sounds dickish, but they do. And then they have this inferiority complex where they are not happy with their current state, and they wanna do more and more and more. Do you have that? [00:07:24] S0: I would say that I definitely had grand ambitions growing up of all the things that I wanted to do, but I don't think it was nearly at the scale of what we're doing today nor how fast it would happen because those two dimensions are nearly impossible to predict. I was definitely ambitious. I I don't think that I had a a perfect sense for what that would look like, though.