Inside Braze’s blitz to $500M in CARR | Building broad, going global, and outfoxing the competition

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. – 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 – 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/ – Where to find Bill: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/billmagnuson/ • Twitter/X: https://x.com/billmag – Where to find Kevin: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-wang-96131916/ – Where to find Brett: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ • Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson – 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 – Timestamps: [00:00:00] Teaser: Finding “terminal value” product market fit [00:00:24] Introduction [00:02:34] Bill's insights into the mobile revolution [00:04:43] Lessons from Bridgewater Associates [00:09:12] First principles thinking in action at Braze [00:14:14] Meeting co-founders at an NYC Hackathon (24:35) Braze’s scrappy scaling [00:33:37] Early product development [00:39:37] From 1,000 beta signups to 2000 paying customers [00:43:51] Braze’s fundraising struggles [00:47:01] Breaking the rules of a lean startup [00:53:02] Riding the mobile wave to success [01:00:02] Building a global customer base [01:04:04] The never-ending quest for PMF [01:10:29] 3 things every founder needs to know [01:13:56] Navigating competition like a boxer [01:19:03] When scale helps or hurts [01:20:32] 1 thing they’ve learned from each other