Henrique Dubugras, the young co-founder of Brex, says he always wanted to live in Los Angeles, but before COVID he felt he had to be in the Bay Area to tend to his red hot fintech unicorn. But late last year, with everyone working remotely, he and his girlfriend, their dog and his co-founder, Pedro Franceschi, all moved into the same L.A. house.
"I'm having the best time," Dubugras told dot.LA co-founder and chairman Spencer Rascoff during a dot.LA Strategy Session Wednesday. "L.A. has been amazing."
Brex has been one of Silicon's Valley's hottest business-to-business or B2B companies in recent years, reaching unicorn status in 2018 just months after launching its first product and quickly fetching a $2.75 billion valuation last spring. So when Dubugras and Franceschi announced they were leaving San Francisco, it was seen as another blow to the Valley.
Dubugras says it helps that he can still easily fly to San Francisco for meetings. He was attracted to L.A.'s warm weather and its greater diversity of sectors.
"I think there's enough of a tech scene and different industries as well to make it very interesting," he said.
He also disputed the stereotype of San Francisco having a better work ethic, saying tech workers there tend to "rest and vest," meaning they are waiting to cash out their lucrative stock options.
"Honestly a lot of people don't work hard in San Francisco," he said.
Brex is most well-known for offering interest-free credit cards to promising startups that do not yet have enough revenue to get approved by bigger banks. Last week, the company sought permission from federal regulators to open its own bank.
Though Dubugras and Franceschi are running the company from L.A., Brex is still officially headquartered in San Francisco but that is in name only as Brex plans to let its lease expire this year.
Dubugras says the company plans to allow its approximately 500 employees to continue working from home for as long as they want to, though the company will open several offices. Unlike most companies that have said their offices will be built around collaboration, Dubugras says Brex's will be centered around providing employees individual workstations.
"We're going to assume everyone is remote, but if you want to go to an office that's fine," Dubugras said.
About the Speakers
Henrique Dubugras, Founder and Co-CEO at Brex
Henrique Dubugras, Founder and Co-CEO of Brex
Henrique Dubugras is co-founder & CEO of Brex — the first of its kind corporate card for startups. A Brazilian entrepreneur, Henrique built payments company Pagar.me — the Stripe of Brazil — when he was 16 years old. In three years, Pagar.me grew to $1.5 billion in volume of transactions processed.
In the fall of 2016, Henrique sold Pagar.me and enrolled at Stanford University. After eight months, he left school and founded Brex, which raised $215M in funding across three rounds in its first 22 months and was the fastest U.S. business-to-business company to be valued at over $1 billion.
Spencer Rascoff, Co-Founder & Executive Chairman at dot.LA
Spencer Rascoff, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman at dot.LA
Spencer Rascoff is an entrepreneur and company leader who co-founded Zillow, Hotwire and dot.LA, and who served as Zillow's CEO for a decade. During Spencer's time as CEO, Zillow won dozens of "best places to work" awards as it grew to over 4,500 employees, $3 billion in revenue, and $10 billion in market capitalization. Prior to Zillow, Spencer co-founded and was VP of corporate development of Hotwire, which was sold to Expedia for $685 million in 2003.
Spencer is now an active angel investor in over 50 companies, and serves as executive chairman of dot.LA, a news site covering the Los Angeles tech scene. He is also co-founder and chairman of a stealth startup, and incubating several other startup companies. Spencer is on the Board of Directors of Palantir, and is a former board member of Zillow Group (Nasdaq: ZG), TripAdvisor (Nasdaq: TRIP), Zulily (Nasdaq: ZU), Julep, and several other tech companies.
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A screenshot of Encore's Studio app for iPhone.
Photo courtesy of Encore
“What's disruptive about what we're doing is it is mobile live performance,” Encore co-founder and CEO Jonathan Gray told dot.LA. “It's free [for the artist] in your pocket, everywhere you go. And I think that's ultimately the vision of the company.”
Founded in 2020, the startup previously required artists to use both an iPad and iPhone to set up a show, with the more powerful tablets ensuring better production quality. But the iPad requirement proved to be a barrier for artists who couldn’t afford one, Gray said. Encore brings artists to its physical studio to perform on a greenscreen stage, too, but the company wants Encore shows to feel less like formal productions. They’ll ideally be something an artist does casually—and frequently—to engage with fans and make money in a lower stakes environment.
“The vision of the company, and the way we will get scale, is with artists doing stuff on their own,” Gray said. “I think as soon as it's on your phone, as soon as you can be going live in a minute, you're totally changing what it means to go live.”
Admission is cheap, but Gray said fans collectively spend a lot of money during a show. Middle-tier artists who have relatively smaller but engaged fan bases have racked up several thousand dollars during an Encore show—without booking a venue or hiring a production team.
“There's this completely untapped part of the music industry that has tons of engagement, but the engagement is on social [media],” Gray said. “Ultimately, your superfans can only stream on Spotify so many times. And even though you have super fans, how many of them are going to show up to a single city on a single night? Not that many.”
The new Encore Studio App lets artists design AR stages, add custom artwork and incorporate visual effects to turn basic spaces into more visually compelling backdrops. Other features include live polls, “backstage pass” video chats, and “clap goals,” in which artists can, for example, entice fans to spend more to hear new music.
Encore has raised $9 million in seed funding so far from investors like Battery Ventures, 468 Capital and Parade Ventures. The company has 14 employees and has facilitated 200 live shows since its first app went live in February. Roughly 2,000 artists have registered with Encore, which shows performers are interested but haven’t tried it, Gray said. That’s a big reason why the company is removing the iPad obstacle.
“You can actually get from downloading the app to having your own AR world and going live in like two minutes,” Gray said. “Before—it was not two minutes.”