Thread by @pedroh96

🧵 Yesterday we made the difficult decision to stop serving traditional small businesses at @brexHQ.

Brex remains deeply committed to serving startups, so let me explain how we got to this (painful) decision, and why it allows us to serve startups even better.

In 2018, we launched Brex as the first corporate card for startups. We were lucky to grow tremendously fast, and serve the fastest growing companies in tech such as DoorDash, @airtable, @scale_AI, @flexport, etc.

As we expanded in 2020, we decided to start serving small businesses. We onboarded tens of thousands of traditional brick-and-mortar companies to Brex, along with tech startups. Our goal was to deliver an exceptional service to all customers, including small businesses.

Over time, we realized that our startup customers – the very customers we started with – were growing very fast, and needed Brex to scale with them. @scale_AI went from 5 people when we started serving them, to almost 1,000. Brex didn’t work as well for larger companies.

Late 2021, we decided to go back to our core, and shift our resources to make sure startups could scale with Brex. We launched Empower in April (our biggest change since launch), and customers love how Brex helps create a culture of speed and financial discipline at scale.

However, we still had tens of thousands of small businesses with very different needs from fast-growing companies. And by spreading ourselves too thin, we couldn’t serve either small businesses or startups well.

1) Small businesses didn’t get the products they needed (e.g. working capital solutions).

2) We had to degrade the white-glove level of service we offered to startups, in order to scale to tens of thousands of customers.

In a more challenging environment, startups rely more on Brex. They need to operate more efficiently, hire globally, etc.

As we continued to scale Empower and build a global payments platform, we realized we couldn’t do a great job serving small businesses at the same time.

This led us to the painful decision to stop serving traditional small businesses. We decided to draw the line of who’s eligible as any customer who received any investment (accelerator, angel, VC, web3 token, etc).

This has been an incredibly difficult decision for the team, and a deeply personal one for me. Many of us at Brex are deeply inspired by what small businesses contribute to their communities, but we believe these customers deserve a partner that’s entirely focused on them.

We know how painful it is to switch financial services in a moment like now, and we’re giving customers two months to migrate. We’re also working with all affected customers to make this process as smooth as possible.

Lessons learned:

1. We should have been more transparent with the startup community about what this means to them.
2. Customers expect a partner that scales with them. Multi-year plans should take it into account.
3. Focus is painful, but it’s what gives meaning to our choices.

If you believe we made a mistake offboarding you, please let us know at [e-mail]

If you received any kind of funding, or are part of the startup community (crypto, angel investor, VC, etc), @brexHQ remains deeply committed to serving you.