Mackenzie is the Global Startup Evangelist at AWS. His days are spent traveling the globe to meet startups, share their stories, and connect engineering teams together. Every day there are a large number of startups launching on AWS across every imaginable industry. It’s Mackenzie’s mission to find stories of startups that are helping to improve the world and share these stories with a wide audience.
Prior to joining AWS, Mackenzie was the Head of Technical Operations at Betterment, the world’s largest independent robo-advisor based in NYC which manages over $8B in assets. Mackenzie was a founding engineer and Head of Technical Operations at Oscar Health, an insurance startup also based in NYC, helping to grow the company to over 400+ employees and a $2.7B valuation. Before Oscar, Mackenzie was one the original engineers at Tumblr where he helped scale the infrastructure to 20B page views a month eventually selling to Yahoo! for $1.1B. He’s worked in a diversified set of industries including global media (MTV/Viacom), global Shipping (DHL), and more. He also holds numerous advisory roles at companies providing technical and business guidance around the world.
Mackenzie is the Global Startup Evangelist at AWS. His days are spent traveling the globe to meet startups, share their stories, and connect engineering teams together. Every day there are a large number of startups launching on AWS across every imaginable industry. It’s Mackenzie’s mission to find stories of startups that are helping to improve the world and share these stories with a wide audience.
Valued at $2.6 billion and unicorn status in less than one year, Brex – the credit card for startups, has hit a number of milestones in record breaking time. Since their 2017 launch out of Y Combinator, they’ve become an instant hit in Silicon Valley by helping other startups gain access to corporate credit cards - which has historically been blocked by commercial banks. Brex has been able to solve a major problem which accounts for their considerable growth trajectory. So how did they do it?
Henrique Dubugras – age 23 and Stanford dropout, is the Co-founder of Brex. He'll share how he and his co-founder came to America from Brazil and built a hypergrowth startup from the ground up. He’ll discuss how they pivoted quickly from their original startup idea and narrowed in on the problem they knew they could solve, along with the uphill climb once they left Y Combinator.
From the wins, to the losses, and the responsibility of running a $2.6 billion startup – he’ll offer lessons learned, share key scaling tactics, outline the steps from a single product to a brand, and the importance of pacing your product growth by building one section at a time.
Networking and drinks to follow.
Henrique Dubugras is Co-Founder & Co-CEO of Brex — the smartest corporate card in the room. A Brazilian entrepreneur, Henrique built payments company Pagar.me — the Stripe of Brazil — when he was sixteen years old. In just 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.
Headquarted in San Francisco, Brex is transforming B2B payments by creating financial technology customized to the industry-specific needs of its customers — starting with the corporate card. Brex has raised $315 million in equity financing from Y Combinator Continuity, Kleiner Perkins Growth, Ribbit Capital, Greenoaks Capital, DST Global, IVP, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin; and secured $100 million of debt capital with Barclays.
Asya Bradley is VP Partnerships at Socure. Previously she was part of the Founding Team at Synapse Financial Technologies as the Chief Revenue Officer. During her tenure at Synapse the company saw 500% YoY growth and raised over $17M in Series A funding.
Asya is a champion of diversity and gender balance in the workplace and works tirelessly to promote women, minorities, LGBTQI and other underrepresented communities. Despite a busy life juggling a full time job in a startup, and three young sons, Asya insists on giving back as the Director of the San Francisco Chapter of the Founder Institute Tech Accelerator.
Asya is also an angel investor, advisor and board member of numerous startups.
