I studied how Brex (YC W17) went from zero to $12.3 billion company in just 6 years

[willy_b]

@alfie13 I’ve heard a bemusing story of their tech stack.

They were successful early adopters of Elixir and OTP, but somewhere along the way decided to make their own macro-heavy OTP replacement to “eliminate boilerplate”. (source: grape vine)

So they crufted their own questionably good internal dialect, then released a FUD-y Elixir -> Kotlin article citing shortfalls of:
- Development Speed
- Learning Curve
- Maintainability
- Community, ecosystem and tooling

They never gave much back to the community, but it’s perhaps better they didn’t.

Their competitors and partners (Ramp and Teller respectively) still use Elixir.

 

[alfie13]

@willy_b Damn that's interesting! Didn't know that lol

Ramp is breaking serious ground tho

 

[nathalie_hyacint]

@alfie13 Cold emails work. My company went from 0 to 10MM ARR in four years. They work

 

[alfie13]

@nathalie_hyacint Amazing!

 

[atlas2023]

@nathalie_hyacint How many emails did it take to get to your first customer? We have sent 500 emails so far with a 50% open rate, 2.5% (of total emails sent) reply rate, and a meeting rate of 0.3% (again of total emails sent) so far. Just curious how your funnel looked like..

 

[sunshine1973]

@alfie13 Killer growth hack, Brex! How's the AI integration on your end?

 

[superzorou]

@alfie13 Brex is likely not even worth $1B anymore after 3 rounds of layoffs, 2 major product/markets pivots and still burning $17M/month with no line of site to cash flow break even.

Add to your list: Make sure your product doesn't just work in a zero interest rate environment.

 

[distressedson]

@alfie13 What were companies using before Brex? I may be wrong but weren’t there many good options before they came along?

 

[alfie13]

You can read the entire post here - https://www.heymarketcurve.com/blog/brex

You can read past issues (and subscribe) here - https://marketcurve.substack.com/

 

[sam1978]

@alfie13 Brex has a shitty product