I sent the following email to the Brex team this week sharing an important milestone for the company. The turnaround is over, Brex is back to operating with unconstrained ambition.

Team,

This August Brex grew 49% and was operating cash flow positive for the first time in history — a completely different scenario from 20 months ago. This level of change is almost unheard of. I couldn’t be more proud of how far we’ve come.

During my wedding and honeymoon I stepped away for 3 weeks — the first time since starting Brex. It was incredible to spend time with my wife and celebrate one of the best days of our lives. Stepping away also helped me put in perspective the journey we all went through at Brex since January 2024: going through a big layoff, changing almost the entire leadership team, resetting our internal valuation, stomaching huge spikes in attrition, returning to office, rethinking how we build and ship product, rebooting every aspect of GTM, and now reimagining our product and operations with AI.

Now 20 months later, it’s clear that Brex 3.0 has worked. We inflected both our growth rate and cash burn. Doing one or the other alone would be already hard at a 1,000-person company, but accomplishing both at the same time doesn’t typically happen. Most companies in our position don’t make it. But this team pulled off the impossible. Getting here took so much energy and personal sacrifice from so many of you, and I am so grateful for everything you all have put in.

It was all worth it. The turnaround is over, and Brex is on a compounding path again. Now, I want to talk about the future.

First, Brex will go back to operating with unconstrained ambition. Henrique and I started Brex as two Brazilian kids in a college dorm, with a crazy idea of one day buying Amex. We knew that dreaming big or small took the same amount of work, so we decided to aim dizzyingly high.

Over the journey of building Brex, however, ambition didn’t always burn clean. Sustaining the insane momentum from the early days made us enamored with silver bullets, instead of focusing on improving what was working. Brex was always one big move away from achieving our dreams: one magic product launch, one great marketing campaign, one great new hire away from solving all of our problems. And we forgot to compound. At the end of 2023, it was clear that the version of ambition that got us there wouldn’t take us to where we wanted to go.

We had to take a massive step back. We spent 20 months licking our wounds, fixing past mistakes, and operating with great humility to question every assumption about the business. We improved so much across every aspect of the business, and yet, the work is far from done. We still have tons to get better in product quality, reliability, marketing, hiring, how we use AI, etc. But now with the turnaround behind us, none of these problems alone are existential anymore. They can and will be fixed. After all, having problems to fix is the very definition of being a company.

The past 20 months have shown us that anything can be fixed with sufficient energy and focus. My level of confidence in our execution is now at an all-time high because the company has internalized the most profound learning from 3.0: the absence of silver bullets. No new product launch, no single superhero individual, no magic growth tactics are substitutes for aggressively improving the very few things that matter every day, and letting compound interest get you to unimaginable places. This is the version of ambition we’ll pursue moving forward.

For next year, we have a very credible plan to grow just as fast again — which is incredibly exciting, and literal proof that the investments we’ve made in product, GTM, and Ops are compounding. In fact, this growth rate at our current revenue scale would put Brex in elite outlier territory: only a handful of companies globally in any given decade pull it off.

But in the spirit of unconstrained ambition, we’re going to try to grow 50% faster – without silver bullets or crazy net-new investments, but by compounding what’s working at a faster rate.

This will be extremely hard. We actually don’t know how to get there, and it will require accelerating the progress in every function in non-obvious ways. It might not even be possible without compromising quality or customer experience. (And I don’t want to do it if it requires shortcuts that undermine the progress of the past 20 months.) But in a market 98% dominated by incumbent banks poorly serving customers, I see no reason why we shouldn’t be growing even faster than today. We define Dream Big as aiming higher than we think it’s possible, and working backwards — so we’re going to do just that. We’ll build a plan, understand the constraints, and share more as we go through FY’27 planning over the next few months.

Lastly, I just wanted to thank you for the trust in me and the leadership team. You all decided to stick around for this ride and give Brex a second chance. I don’t take this for granted, because really, this is the only reason we’re here. The last two years were the most challenging of my career, but also the most rewarding. Not because of the turnaround itself, but because it reminded me that doing hard things is actually really freaking worth it. It raises the stakes, brings people closer, extracts the best of us, and transforms us all for the better.

With the turnaround behind us, the greatest gift from Brex 3.0 was earning the right to be ambitious again. We’re still 1% of the market. It’s a blue ocean out there. I’m so proud of the company we have become, and I can’t wait to see where compounding hard things will take us.

Onwards!

Pedro