On the TechVancouver stage ×1
First seen on the TechVancouver stage in 2019. Every talk is searchable — ask the archive about Henrique ↗
In their words
Today I sometimes get in the elevator and I don't know if I should say hi or not, because I don't know if the person works at Brex. That's a problem, because you still need to connect to people and know what's happening in the company.
Something people forget when the company is growing: six months after, we had doubled. So there's half the company that didn't know anything we said before. You have to repeat everything you're saying many, many times, and be very consistent.
The thing that sucks the most about Silicon Valley is that people change companies every two years on average. You get someone young and hungry, you train them, they have a year doing a great job, and boom, they move to another company. It's really hard to create a culture.
Around the web ×2
Quick answers
Who is Henrique Dubugras?
A Brazilian-born founder based in San Francisco. He co-founded Brex with Pedro Franceschi in 2017, selling corporate cards and spend management to startups, and was co-CEO until June 2024, when the company moved to a single chief executive and he became board chair. Capital One agreed to buy Brex in January 2026 and closed the deal on 7 April 2026.
What did he announce on the TechVancouver stage?
A Vancouver office. He opened the August 2019 fireside by announcing that Brex had opened there and was hiring software engineers and customer-experience staff, and later said the draw was how long people stay at one company in Canada compared with Silicon Valley, where the average tenure is about two years.
How did he start out?
By trying to play a game he couldn't pay for. He taught himself to code at 12 in Brazil to build a free version of it, shut it down at 14 after legal notices arrived, then traded free coding work to a Stanford graduate in exchange for being taught the US university application process — which led to an education startup, and eventually to Brex.