An origin story of Tencent and Chinese internet companies — Tencent is among the largest technology companies in the world. According to The Verge, it is the most valuable company of any sort in Asia. Tencent owns WeChat, the “everything app” with almost 1 billion users — many of which are active for more than 4 hours a day. Bloomberg…

Delighting customers through banking data feeds — Brex’s diverse customers use a variety of software tools to run and grow their businesses. About half of all our customers use some form of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) application and expect Brex data to seamlessly integrate with their existing productivity tools. In late 2019, we identified two sizable opportunities: …

Like Venture Capital, But For Solar and Wind Farms — Project finance is the fabric that brings together the stakeholders and components that make capital-intensive renewable energy projects a reality. The world has significant decarbonization targets to reach by 2050, and the energy transition is estimated by Bloomberg and McKinsey to cost about $200 trillion. With so much money required…

Reflecting on SVB’s Impact on Climate Tech — As someone who used to work at Brex in San Francisco, a Silicon Valley Bank competitor, we looked at SVB with a competitive spirit and admiration. I once crashed an SVB event for founders at a taco restaurant in the Mission — they were undeniably a historical force in the…

The topic of (clean) energy has been receiving unprecedented attention lately. There are a few factors that make it all the more relevant today: The war: The Russian invasion of Ukraine triggered a supply shock and spike in energy prices, especially in the EU The Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act…

From an underrated chapter in Zero to One Zero to One by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters is likely the most commonly read book in the startup ecosystem and often the first title in the Silicon Valley Syllabus™. I’ve read the book a handful of times, but a chapter that…

About the fraying wires between Americans and our energy future — One of the most recommended books by people I met in the renewable energy ecosystem, The Grid by Gretchen Bakke is a riveting dive into a fundamental piece of infrastructure that moves American society — the electrical grid. Bakke goes into the past, present and future of the grid and…

Field notes from learning Django — I’ve always wanted to experiment with Django after trying out Flask a few years ago. After some initial experimentation to build a search tool for solar farms (django backend, react frontend), I think Django is an optimal choice for building an API quickly from data models. It works great with…

Why work at a startup + some takeaways from Brex — A lot of my friends seem to be thinking about career moves lately or are considering new opportunities. I hope that sharing a bit of my rationale and learnings during almost 3 years at a breakout startup can be helpful to those considering similar paths. How it happened for me Before Brex, I started my…