A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:18:19 · Cosmin Nicolaescu, Pablo Srugo
[00:18:19] S0: Yeah. So quick highlight of my career. So originally grew up in Romania, moved here for college to study computer science, and then started my career at Microsoft. So worked super super large companies, worked on Azure Office 65, so all the cloud services. Then I was like, I want to do something much smaller. I moved to San Francisco, joined Stripe, I think it was about a 100 people when when I joined. Got to build all the payment rails, got to work with my now cofounder very very closely, we're on the same team together. Then joined Brex to kind of repeat that, but at at a different stage. I I was like, I can run a function now and and join even earlier. I I joined Brex, I think it was thirty, forty people. I was there for about six years kinda building a function. After all that time, like, I've always told people, unless you're the founder of a company, you shouldn't be at the same place forever. I very much encourage people not to jump ship every one to two years, not just because it looks bad, but because to actually see, especially as a software engineer, to see the impact of your work takes time. It's one thing to build something new, it's a different thing to scale it, it's a different thing to iterate on that. [00:19:23] S1: It's like the Toby, like, tour of duty idea, like, come here, do your five years, you know, make something happen, move on.
00:19:28 · Cosmin Nicolaescu
[00:19:28] S0: Correct. Do it. So it's like, for me, like, three to five years, people staying in that range feels, it feels quite good. If you stay longer, there's nothing wrong with it. Obviously, people have had immense careers at these companies that are rocket ships, if you're on a rocket ship, like hang on and learn as much as you can. Yeah, that's right. If the company is not good, I get it. But if you have that pattern, there's probably something not great there. And so for me, yeah, six years, obviously, I was in in that kind of range. I looked at it mostly from where do I think I provide the most value and where do I get most excitement? I, having gone to smaller and smaller and smaller, I just internalized that I enjoy building and being closer to what gets built than running large organizations and scaling companies. And my path at Brex, if I would have stayed, would have been to be the CTO of a public company or now that it got acquired, be part of a larger organization. That was kind of the, I am becoming an executive at large scale and that wasn't super attractive to me. Again, I enjoy building, I don't enjoy kind of coordinating things across the organ, aligning and reviewing as much. Very critical and I think there's people who are exceptional at that, just not where I get energy from that. And so that was kind of my plan of like, okay, I probably should hand this off to someone else and we had someone exceptional on on my team who I've known for many many years that took the baton and has been doing phenomenal there. So also a good growth opportunity for someone internal to transition. Then there's a question of, okay, now what do you do? And I've just like, I take the approach on building the harder parts of of the product first. The same thing is true in my career, which is if I'm not challenged and I'm not learning, I get bored very quickly. And so the idea of going and repeating and being a CTO again and going through another wave of the something similar, have to a different industry, different founders, wasn't that appealing to me. Like, I kinda knew what that looked like, and I didn't feel like I would learn as much. Going back to a big company, again, not exciting, I would have stayed at Brex otherwise. And so for me being a founder felt like the next challenge that I've never done before.
00:21:30 · Cosmin Nicolaescu
And the only thing that I knew for sure leaving Brex after taking some time off is that Sid and I want to build something together. I would have not done this alone, people that do this alone, mad respect for them, I don't know how they do it. It was very much like, we're going to build something together, we'll figure out what it is, we'll do things our way and try to see if building a company in the shape and kind of culture that resonates with us can be successful, and get to learn what it's like to be in a different role. Like, I've been an engineer. I've been a manager. I've been an executive. Now I can be a founder and take the beating from that.
00:22:05 · Pablo Srugo
[00:22:05] S1: You know, I envy the founders who just have this problem happen to them, like, you know, the Toby from Shopify story, and they go out and they solve it and it becomes this massive business. Because that feels like I know I I'm wrong saying this, but it feels like easy mode, at least at inception. It's kinda like you just get pulled into something, you do it, and then executing is obviously hard. But starting is relatively easy because it's natural. It's organic. What you did, I consider hard mode, which is I don't know what I wanna build. I know that I wanna work with this person, but I have no idea, like, what to build. And, you know, and especially, like, you've been and you've seen greatness. You've seen the successes. It's almost harder in a sense, like, when you're right out of school, you're just like, whatever. Like, let's just build some shit. Who cares? Like, where you have the bar of this is with Stripe, this is Brexx. Like, it needs to be at least, like, at that level. So I'd love to go as specifically as you can through that period. I guess it would be like early twenty four where you and your co founder are trying to figure out, okay, cool. What what do we what do we build?
00:22:58 · Cosmin Nicolaescu, Pablo Srugo
[00:22:58] S0: Yeah. So we spent, I would say, hardcore three to four months, loosely five to six months rates turning, iterating through ideas. It's interesting they say easy mode or hard mode. I always look at it as like there's some founders who know their mission on earth is to cure cancer or solve whatever problem or industry. And in those cases, it's relatively easy. This is what I'm doing. Like, infamously, Zuck, when he was, he had the offer to get acquired by, I think it was Microsoft for a billion dollars, Basically, it was like, if I sell this company, I I would go and build another social media company and I already have one that I quite like, so why would I go do that? Elon, similarly, right, like, wants to make humans a multi planetary species, that's everything kinda goes towards that. And you have a lot of the founders that have that, Brian Armstrong with Crypto, Patrick and John at Stripe, very clear, like, this is my life's work. I neither Slither or I had that in particular. It's true that on a personal level, like, I donated to charities of random things because I empathize with a lot of those things. I want puppies to have a better life in shelters, I want kids with autism to have a better life, I want older people to have, enjoy the last years of their life, I want to solve any disease like [00:24:19] S1: I wanna fix all the problems, all of them.
00:24:20 · Cosmin Nicolaescu
[00:24:20] S0: I don't get special pleasure from one versus the other. And so for us, the main thing was impact. Anything that we do has to have very high impact because for me it's like learning and impact are the two things in my life that have motivated me the most. Whenever I've been bored, I kind of spiral out and then don't do well and lose focus. And if what I'm doing doesn't have impact, that it's kind of like why am I like being a founder, working at an early stage company even as an employee is just like so much work that if you're not having the impact, like, why are you doing this? And so everything that we kind of shortlisted was industry wide impact, transformational, And not only that, but the transformation of that industry should result in something better for a much wider group of people. So for us, the motivation for accounting was seeing what Stripe and then subsequently for me, Brex operated at when finance and accounting became very strategic. I'd stripe became very strategic when Will Gabriel became CFO. At Brex, it was from the beginning. One of our first hires was the our CFO. Both cases, very business oriented. Finance and accounting was in the room for most important decisions, and that results in generally better decisions. Same thing on individuals, like every wealthy American that you know has a family office, has accountants that help them make better decisions and optimize for the long run. And so how can we actually bring that to every business so accounting is not just a back office kind of function that just ticks some boxes? How do we help every individual have better financial planning and financial decisions and education from their accountant, and more people being able to have access to that because it's such a small percentage of of folks that have the ability to do that. And so that was kind of the the motivation of why we wanna go in this industry in terms of impact, and how will that impact actually benefit society more broadly.