- Brex Startup Community Newsletter
- Posts
- Your 5 person AI startups still needs Series A money
Your 5 person AI startups still needs Series A money
The headcount efficiency trap that's fooling founders and investors

Happy Tuesday Brex community,
Seedstrapped AI-native founders and investors, your lean team of 5 tastemakers crushing 90%+ gross margins is a weapon, but GTM is a capital-hungry beast. Bloated legacy SaaS rivals are flooding the market with massive budgets, stealing share while your $1M in engineering savings sits idle. Pour that cash into ferocious GTM plays. Track CAC payback like hawks to ensure every dollar compounds. Price on value delivered, like insights or automations, not usage, to dodge compute cost spikes that tank NDR. Test pricing fast with early customers to lock in scalable margins.
Scaling sales costs serious money, and capital rules GTM. Reinvest your lean savings to outmaneuver bigger players, turning efficiency into market dominance. VC is your sword! Use it to grab distribution and redefine the market. Without aggressive GTM, giants will bury you. How will you deploy capital to own the market?
I'd love to hear from you, whether you agree or disagree!
Growing together, Michael Morgenstern

Boston Brews: Finance Happy Hour in Boston 6/3
Designed as a finance happy hour in Boston. We'll have a private brewery tour, give away Celtics swag, and attendees will get a chance to win Red Sox tickets.Apply Here: Brex Host: Shai Goldman
Brex Golf Club - Finance Leader Edition New York Tech Week 6/3
Designed as an intimate golf outing for finance leaders in NYC
Apply Here: Brex Host: Anshul Shah
Brex Flex Club - Yoga Edition New York Tech Week 6/4
Designed as yoga class for Brex clients to jumpstart your day
Apply Here: Brex Host: Ilias Benabdallah
Brex Founder Fuel Up - New York Tech Week 6/4
Free coffee in Union Square, pull up!
Apply Here: Brex Host: Ilias Benabdallah
Brex Social Club w/ Khosla Ventures and Stripe - New York Tech Week 6/4
Designed as a social mixer for founders and investors
Apply Here: Brex Host: Gaby Levey
Brex Shabbat Club - New York Tech Week Edition 6/6
Designed for founders and investors as at traditional shabbat dinner to end Tech Week.
Apply Here: Brex Host: Michael Morgenstern

Ethan Austin is the founding partner of Outside VC

Ethan Austin is the founding partner of Outside VC, a pre-seed fintech and climate firm with the core belief that outsiders, not insiders, build the world's most iconic companies. The firm boasts an NPS of 97 from its portfolio founders and has the reputation of going to bat for its portfolio companies in a way that few firms do.
Prior to launching Outside VC, Ethan was a managing director at Techstars, launching the Techstars LA and Techstars Western Union accelerators. Before that, he was a longtime impact founder who helped pioneer crowdfunding in 2008 with the world's first medical crowdfunding platform, GiveForward, saving over 10,000 lives in the process before joining GoFundMe in 2017. Prior to starting GiveForward, he had gloriously failed the CA bar exam, gotten fired from multiple crappy jobs in high school, and folded at least 2500 pizza boxes throughout an illustrious pizza delivery career at BJ's Pizzeria.

i'm curious...would you rather run a VC-backed startup doing $600K/month (but raised $3M)… or a bootstrapped one doing $60K/month with no investors, no board, and full control?
— GREG ISENBERG (@gregisenberg)
8:08 PM • Jun 1, 2025
BREAKING: Wander Raises $50M Series B, Bringing Their Total Funding to $100M+ To Reinvent Luxury Travel
Fresh off the term sheet, John Andrew Entwistle, Founder & CEO, breaks down @wander's growth & the round led by QED Investors & Fifth Wall, w/ participation from Redpoint,
— Molly O’Shea (@MollySOShea)
4:20 PM • May 28, 2025


Alexandra: [email protected] | X.com
Anshul: [email protected] | X.com
Conor: [email protected] | X.com
Erica: [email protected] | X.com
Emily: [email protected] | X.com
Ilias Benabdallah: [email protected] | X.com
Jason: [email protected] | X.com
Jonathan: [email protected] | X.com
Michael: [email protected] | X.com
Phil Chen: [email protected] | X.com
Shai: [email protected] | X.com

The financial stack you can bank on. Trusted by 1 in 3 US startups, Brex allows you to manage your spend from MVP to IPO. Interested? Sign up here using the referral code NEWSLETTER and get 25,000 bonus points, $5K AWS credits, $2.5K OpenAI credits and up to $150K in SaaS discounts.
Don’t hesitate to reach out,🦾!