The NRR advantage: unlocking a 63% premium

Companies are shifting hiring strategies and operating models to boost NRR

Author

Michael Morgenstern
March 04, 2025

Happy Tuesday Brex community,

After a close reading of Stripe’s 2024 Annual Letter, the message is clear: startups are scaling faster than ever. Venture-backed companies now hit ARR milestones in two years instead of three. There are examples of startups growing 0-$20M ARR in 2 months. Just in the past few weeks, I've met startups with strong NRR building products that help businesses and consumers fight industrialized fraud, deploy AI agents for niche vertical markets, and embed Stablecoin payments infrastructure. That said, when net revenue retention (NRR) exceeds 120%1, companies command a 63% premium in public markets!

Hyper-growth in 2025 depends on lean, agile teams equipped with fresh roles—Ambassadors, XIRs (Experts in Residence), Heads of Creative Experimentation, and Platform Taste Managers—who drive cross-functional impact. Every move must boost retention and efficiency. In this lean capital environment, execution is everything: build products customers love and lock in market share. Consider me excited, lots going on and hyper growth has never been more attainable.

Growing together, Michael Morgenstern

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Anurag Goel is the founder of Render

Render is a modern cloud application platform on a mission to accelerate software innovation by empowering developers to ship quickly, confidently, and at scale. By allowing teams of all sizes to build and scale full-stack applications without complexity and overhead, Render enables application developers to focus on product development and customer innovation. Our product set includes compute services, fully managed datastores, enterprise-grade reliability and advanced security. Render’s product-led growth has attracted over 2 million developers, with 100,000+ joining every month. In January 2025, Render reached a significant milestone by raising $80 million in Series C financing, bringing our total funding to $157M. Get started on Render with BREX-2025 to unlock up to $5K in credits.

Ambassadors Perspective: They’re creating the modern AWS by eliminating the clutter of hundreds of discrete services while providing the power, flexibility, and scale that teams need. We are watching closely!

Anish Acharya is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz

Anish Acharya focuses on consumer investing, including AI-native products and companies that will help usher in a new era of abundance. Anish first joined the a16z in 2019 with a focus on fintech, often investing in B2C technologies. He currently serves on the boards of Clutch, Deel, HappyRobot, Mosaic, Method, The Coterie, and Titan. He is also a board observer at Arc, Carbonated, and [untitled].

Prior to joining Andreessen Horowitz, Anish founded and sold two consumer companies, successfully navigating multiple technology platform shifts. In 2014, Anish founded Snowball, a universal inbox for Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, SMS, and other mobile messaging clients to help consumers rethink how they communicate online. After Snowball was acquired by Credit Karma in 2015, he served as GM of Core Consumer and GM of Cards. He helped scale the U.S. Card to over 100 million members and nearly $1 billion in 2019 revenue.

 

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