Kind of saw that coming. The salaries at Brex were insane.
To be fair, everyone is laying off. Whatever paid peanuts or millions. Hopefully, the devs who got the bigger piece of the cake stashed some under the mattress.
Brex Layoffs
41–50 of 161 posts
Re: Brex Layoffs
#42It's really disappointing to see the trajectory that Brex is on. I was extremely enthusiastic about their product, they had the best business banking/credit/expense tracking in the industry. I was a very happy customer, until they decided they would only chase SV startup unicorns as their customers, and terminated my account. Brex is very much a cautionary tale for other startups.
They lied (or did not clearly inform their sales people) about their AWS credit promotion a few years ago which really annoyed me when they were trying to sell us. Went back to the safe embrace of SVB but I guess that didn't really play out well. As a startup I desperately want to see more credit card companies willing to offer cards to founders without ridiculous personal guarantees, so I hope they figure it out.
I have used SVB in the past as well, for my first startup. They were solidly OK. This is still an area ripe for disruption IMO, old Brex filled the niche but for some reason we just can't do payments and banking correctly in the US. India has UPI for instance, and even foreigners can avail themselves of this facility.
Re: Brex Layoffs
#43Company was burning $17m per month with less than $300m in revenue... while growing at a slower rate than ramp.com . simply unsustainable.
Is there some relevance in the comparison to ramp.com or were you just mentioning it as an example?
Re: Brex Layoffs
#44I like that they shared publicly the severance package (I missed that in a company before, the severance package was only available to the ones laid off, and you wouldn't even know if you got the same as your colleagues). And the package itself seems alright too (and sensible, for example: the laid off can keep their laptops. What would company do with almost 300 extra laptops?). Time of the lay off also not too bad…
The laptop thing is usually less about clawing back property and more about preventing the laptop, potentially with customer PII and source code and other stuff on it, ending up sold on ebay or left laying around as a personal device to be eventually lost at an airport 3 years later, and so on. They take them back, wipe them, then either resell them to a reseller or reissue them to other employees etc.
If they are managed devices (which I hope they are at a fintech company), it should be trivial to remote wipe them before removing MDM from them to enable personal use/resale etc.
Re: Brex Layoffs
#45Oof to this link in the post https://www.brex.com/journal/operate-at-all-levels What a terrible culture, dunking on people management, calling it meaningless And no, I don't want the Director of AI to explain react component rendering to me, it sounds like they are grooming a generation of super-micromanaging executives. Maybe the CTO was kicked out after he failed to complete 3 back to back leetcode hards
> it sounds like they are grooming a generation of super-micromanaging executives
My read from the linked example was the Director built a tool outside of the critical path that was a quality of life (performance) improvement. This is a prime example of code that leaders should be writing - the team isn’t blocked by them, they can put it down at any time, they maintain familiarity with the tools and codebase (both the good and the bad), and if it lands then the team is uplifted.
Re: Brex Layoffs
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you think there is a career out there better than (I assume) software development? My view is that we are still in pretty good times. Maybe not great, but everyone who kept their jobs is still earning a big salary. And everything else other than software development is worse (specifically if you bundle things like ML into “software development“). I am curious. What career would you change to?
Attorney. Build a system, work from anywhere, make your own schedule. Hard to outsource.
Really? I would have assumed that attorney is one of those jobs that is going to be hugely disrupted by AI. Should people new to the field bother if they aren't going to be top X% (5? 10?)?
Re: Brex Layoffs
#47"high velocity"
Terminal Velocity
Re: Brex Layoffs
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Attorney. Build a system, work from anywhere, make your own schedule. Hard to outsource.
Really? I would have assumed that attorney is one of those jobs that is going to be hugely disrupted by AI. Should people new to the field bother if they aren't going to be top X% (5? 10?)?
There's way more to legal work than filling out forms. The AI is going to replace legal assistants, not the attorneys themselves.
Re: Brex Layoffs
#49It's insane how much bullshit is on their home page. Can someone explain what the hell are "smart spending" and "integrated cards"?