Bassam Ismail

Pedro Franceschi explains why Brex doesn’t hire “people managers” anymore One day Brex founder Pedro Franceschi made a list of all of the leaders at the company who worked and didn’t work. “I was trying to find what was predictive of leadership success,” he explains. “A lot of things are important, but they’re not predictive. For example, being customer obsessed is important, but there are people who were customer obsessed who were on both sides of the list.” The only trait that Pedro found to be predictive of leadership success at Brex was what he calls “the ability to operate at all levels” — someone who even at the highest levels of leadership has a deep understanding of the details of execution at the individual contributor level. What this means in practice is a CTO who is actually a great engineer. A Head of Design who can actually design amazing products. And a great Head of Sales who can actually go and close deals themselves if they need to. “It doesn’t mean that they’re going to do that all the time,” Pedro explains, “But it means that they know the nuances of what makes someone great at the craft… If you don’t know how to identify greatness because you don’t know what the bar is yourself, there’s no way to build a team that’s great.” He continues: “A lot of companies develop this role over time that people call a ‘people manager.’ They’re Director of Engineering but they can’t really code because they manage people now… And that concept is just something we eliminated. At the end of the day, there’s no way to manage people divorced from the work — you’re managing the work itself.” Pedro uses Jony Ive as an example: “Jony Ive wasn’t managing the team that designed the iPhone. He was designing the iPhone with a group of people. It’s simple, but it is a very profound change in how you orient your relationship with the work and what you put out there in the world. And I think you have to select for people who appreciate the actual output of the work and the work itself, not the process of doing the work… What matters is: Do you know what great looks like? Can you do it yourself? And can you bring people along with a really high bar for doing it at all level.” Video source: @kleinerperkins (2025)

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