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Pedro Franceschi on the advice Paul Graham gave him about scaling Brex

June 30, 2025

In 2019, Brex was generating more than $100 million in revenue, scaling, and growing really fast. Founder Pedro Franceschi recalls having a conversation with Paul Graham around this time and asking, “What’s the job of the founder at this new scale?”

Paul Graham replied:

“The job of a founder is to figure out how to be happy. If you believe in founder-led companies, the thing that matters most is you being there to lead it. And if you don’t like it, you’re not going to do it because people won’t do what they don’t like for a long time. What’s impressive about the Collison brothers at Stripe or Mark Zuckerberg at Meta is not that Meta is a trillion dollar company and growing. It’s that it’s a trillion dollar company, growing, and the founder is still there 20 years later. That’s the part that’s really impressive… A lot of it is: how do you manufacture the culture, the way of working, and the way of building to be something that gives you energy so that you can do it for a long time?”