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Brex’s 1st Employee On Thinking Like a Founder | Michael Tannenbaum, CEO of Figure
Michael Tannenbaum is the CEO of Figure, the blockchain lending company he took public in 2025.
He was employee #1 at Brex, and before that ran the mortgage business at SoFi. Mike Cagney, who founded both SoFi and Figure, pulled him back to take Figure public in 2025.
This is a conversation on how to think and act like a founder, the framework he uses to run Figure, plus a look at how a lending business works under the hood, why he ran the broken mortgage business at SoFi to prove himself, the time Masa offered him a billion dollars, how he nearly walking away from Brex right before they…
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