A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:15:59 · Pablo Srugo
[00:15:59] S1: It's the comeback of the all in one, and it's also raises the bar for choosing correctly. Because if you had a one point solution and you picked wrong, you just swap it. But if you go with the wrong partner, you know, three years out, you're gonna be behind a lot of other people.
00:16:13 · Cosmin Nicolaescu
[00:16:13] S0: And you see that a lot. Like, another thing that we were looking at initially to your product market fit point was how much are we building a ChatGPT wrapper, like, around these models versus kind of going really deep there? And obviously, we went down to build workflows really deep and understand that domain, but a good litmus test to see whether you're building this kind of all in one platform that has very high stakes but potentially high rewards is how many of them can you try out at once, not as a pilot, you can pilot multiple tools and I think that's fine and encouraged actually, but how many can you actually deploy live? So if I give an example of like, let's take a research tool, or even kind of, I want to give everybody ChatGPT. I don't know if ChatGPT is better, or Cloud is better, or Copilot is better, I'm just gonna give license to all three of them and people can use any of them or different people get access to different ones and see which one ends up being protected. Very low cost of change management and thus very low cost of of deploying. If you're using ChatGPT and tomorrow I tell you you're using Claude, you're going to switch pretty easily between between those as a just consumer, which is why we've seen people switch between these tools as as an individual. Very different when you go very deep on these workflows, and you're now rewriting the standard operating procedure, and you're sending stuff to your clients, you have various people in different roles throughout the different parts of the workflow, use your product all in one. Like, think the single use scenario, like a single player scenario where I'm doing some work with some tools is very different when I'm working as part of a collection of people throughout the workflow and all of us use the same tool. And I think the latter is way harder, and you're taking much more of a risk as a firm in deploying that because the cost of switching is indeed much higher, which is why all this the existing software is actually so sticky despite the quality of of the software.
00:18:07 · Pablo Srugo, Cosmin Nicolaescu
[00:18:07] S1: So let's go back and and go through the story now that we understand kind of the value and and the product market for the moment. You were a CTO at Brex, and, you know, walk me through your decision to leave and start accrual. What's the kind of origin story here? [00:18:19] S0: Yeah. So quick highlight of my career. So originally grew up in Romania, moved here for college to study computer science, and then started my career at Microsoft. So worked super super large companies, worked on Azure Office 65, so all the cloud services. Then I was like, I want to do something much smaller. I moved to San Francisco, joined Stripe, I think it was about a 100 people when when I joined. Got to build all the payment rails, got to work with my now cofounder very very closely, we're on the same team together. Then joined Brex to kind of repeat that, but at at a different stage. I I was like, I can run a function now and and join even earlier. I I joined Brex, I think it was thirty, forty people. I was there for about six years kinda building a function. After all that time, like, I've always told people, unless you're the founder of a company, you shouldn't be at the same place forever. I very much encourage people not to jump ship every one to two years, not just because it looks bad, but because to actually see, especially as a software engineer, to see the impact of your work takes time. It's one thing to build something new, it's a different thing to scale it, it's a different thing to iterate on that.
00:18:19 · Cosmin Nicolaescu, Pablo Srugo
[00:18:19] S0: Yeah. So quick highlight of my career. So originally grew up in Romania, moved here for college to study computer science, and then started my career at Microsoft. So worked super super large companies, worked on Azure Office 65, so all the cloud services. Then I was like, I want to do something much smaller. I moved to San Francisco, joined Stripe, I think it was about a 100 people when when I joined. Got to build all the payment rails, got to work with my now cofounder very very closely, we're on the same team together. Then joined Brex to kind of repeat that, but at at a different stage. I I was like, I can run a function now and and join even earlier. I I joined Brex, I think it was thirty, forty people. I was there for about six years kinda building a function. After all that time, like, I've always told people, unless you're the founder of a company, you shouldn't be at the same place forever. I very much encourage people not to jump ship every one to two years, not just because it looks bad, but because to actually see, especially as a software engineer, to see the impact of your work takes time. It's one thing to build something new, it's a different thing to scale it, it's a different thing to iterate on that. [00:19:23] S1: It's like the Toby, like, tour of duty idea, like, come here, do your five years, you know, make something happen, move on.
00:19:28 · Cosmin Nicolaescu
[00:19:28] S0: Correct. Do it. So it's like, for me, like, three to five years, people staying in that range feels, it feels quite good. If you stay longer, there's nothing wrong with it. Obviously, people have had immense careers at these companies that are rocket ships, if you're on a rocket ship, like hang on and learn as much as you can. Yeah, that's right. If the company is not good, I get it. But if you have that pattern, there's probably something not great there. And so for me, yeah, six years, obviously, I was in in that kind of range. I looked at it mostly from where do I think I provide the most value and where do I get most excitement? I, having gone to smaller and smaller and smaller, I just internalized that I enjoy building and being closer to what gets built than running large organizations and scaling companies. And my path at Brex, if I would have stayed, would have been to be the CTO of a public company or now that it got acquired, be part of a larger organization. That was kind of the, I am becoming an executive at large scale and that wasn't super attractive to me. Again, I enjoy building, I don't enjoy kind of coordinating things across the organ, aligning and reviewing as much. Very critical and I think there's people who are exceptional at that, just not where I get energy from that. And so that was kind of my plan of like, okay, I probably should hand this off to someone else and we had someone exceptional on on my team who I've known for many many years that took the baton and has been doing phenomenal there. So also a good growth opportunity for someone internal to transition. Then there's a question of, okay, now what do you do? And I've just like, I take the approach on building the harder parts of of the product first. The same thing is true in my career, which is if I'm not challenged and I'm not learning, I get bored very quickly. And so the idea of going and repeating and being a CTO again and going through another wave of the something similar, have to a different industry, different founders, wasn't that appealing to me. Like, I kinda knew what that looked like, and I didn't feel like I would learn as much. Going back to a big company, again, not exciting, I would have stayed at Brex otherwise. And so for me being a founder felt like the next challenge that I've never done before.
00:21:30 · Cosmin Nicolaescu
And the only thing that I knew for sure leaving Brex after taking some time off is that Sid and I want to build something together. I would have not done this alone, people that do this alone, mad respect for them, I don't know how they do it. It was very much like, we're going to build something together, we'll figure out what it is, we'll do things our way and try to see if building a company in the shape and kind of culture that resonates with us can be successful, and get to learn what it's like to be in a different role. Like, I've been an engineer. I've been a manager. I've been an executive. Now I can be a founder and take the beating from that.