Inside Braze’s blitz to $500M in CARR | Building broad, going global, and outfoxing the competition | Bill Magnuson (Co-founder & CEO) and Kevin Wang (CPO)
Episode description
Bill Magnuson is the co-founder and CEO at Braze, along with Kevin Wang, who joined as employee #8 and serves as the CPO. The two MIT graduates have built Braze into a publicly listed customer engagement platform with a $4.4B market cap. In 2023, Braze surpassed $500M in CARR, and serves over 2,200 customers worldwide. Before Braze, Bill spent time at Bridgewater Associates. Kevin’s academic background is in brain & cognitive sciences, and prior to joining Braze he worked at Accenture and Brewgene.
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In today’s episode, we discuss:
- The Braze founders’ early insights into the mobile revolution
- How a TechCrunch Hackathon sparked Braze's creation
- The journey from 1,000 beta signups to 2,200+ paying customers
- Breaking traditional lean startup rules
- Navigating early fundraising challenges
- Finding product market fit by “fishing in every pond”
- Approaching competition strategically like a boxer
- Much more
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Referenced:
- Accenture: https://www.accenture.com/
- Appboy: https://www.braze.com/resources/articles/appboy-social-network-for-mobile-apps
- Bipul Sinha: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bipulsinha/
- Braze: https://www.braze.com/
- Bridgewater Associates: https://www.bridgewater.com/
- Jon Hyman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jon-hyman/
- Mark Ghermezian: https://x.com/markgher
- MIT: https://www.mit.edu/
- Rubrik: https://www.rubrik.com/
- WeWork: https://www.wework.com/
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Where to find Bill:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/billmagnuson/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/billmag
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Where to find Kevin:
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Where to find Brett:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson
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Where to find First Round Capital:
- Website: https://firstround.com/
- First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital
- This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast
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Timestamps:
(00:00) Teaser: Finding “terminal value” product market fit
(00:24) Introduction
(02:34) Bill's insights into the mobile revolution
(04:43) Lessons from Bridgewater Associates
(09:12) First principles thinking in action at Braze
(14:14) Meeting co-founders at an NYC Hackathon
(24:35) Braze’s scrappy scaling
(33:37) Early product development
(39:37) From 1,000 beta signups to 2,200+ paying customers
(43:51) Braze’s fundraising struggles
(47:01) Breaking the rules of a lean startup
(53:02) Riding the mobile wave to success
(60:02) Building a global customer base
(64:04) The never-ending quest for PMF
(70:29) 3 things every founder needs to know
(73:56) Navigating competition like a boxer
(79:03) When scale helps or hurts
(80:32) 1 thing they’ve learned from each other