Welcome to your Weekend!

A week or so ago, I did a double redeye trip from New York to San Francisco, largely to see Brex co-founder Pedro Franceschi. As often happens these days, we spent part of our time in San Francisco talking about New York, where Franceschi had recently lived for a year and a half, stationing himself in a swank SoHo pad. In New York, he devoted much of his time to talking to finance-focused folks he couldn’t access as easily out West—hoping to glean some insights that could improve his fintech’s offerings. 

“An amazing experience,” Franceschi said. “I met so many interesting people. There were days when there were three interesting people in town, and you could have dinner with all three.”

He’s back in the San Francisco Bay Area now, and hopes to apply the pearls of wisdom from those conversations to Brex in earnest. Just days before my trip, he and co-founder Henrique Dubugras had announced 20% layoffs and outlined a substantial new direction to employees. Since launching in 2018, Brex, a fintech whose business relies on startups and tech companies, has always had its fortunes interwoven with the greater startup ecosystem, making it a singular measure on Silicon Valley’s overall health.

Tech remains deep in an economic winter, and Franceschi and Dubugras are eager to fulfill investor expectations that they can grow and turn a profit after surviving a “roller coaster of a past year.” A tall order, though Franceschi insisted it’ll happen in this week's Big Read. “We’ve had doubters,” Franceschi acknowledged, “that’s always been true.”—Abram Brown

The Big Read

The Brex Boys’ Uncomfortable Reckoning

Pedro Franceschi, 27, and Henrique Dubugras, 28, became poster kids of the unicorn boom—then billionaires—with a startup built atop other startups. As some of their customers teeter toward a bust, they hope to secure a very different fate for themselves.

Supply Closet

A Guide to Valentine’s Day Gifts, According to Actual Power Couples

Money may not buy happiness, but who’s to say you can’t get a better return on investment when it comes to love? Our collection of Valentine’s Day presents comes from conversations with five power couples about what they’re giving this year and what they’ve given in the past—from Apple’s Vision Pro to an AI-powered chessboard to a limited-edition Rolex.

As a bonus, here are two more suggestions from another couple I’m fond of: our Margaux MacColl, who assembled the guide, and her husband Connor. She bought Connor, an avid cyclist, a lush poster of a Tour de France stage ($59); he bought her Wellfit’s Walking Pad Treadmill ($399.99), which “I’ve been asking him to get me for months,” Margaux said.

Listening: A Newly Acquired Taste

Where “All-In” offers a temperature check on contemporary Silicon Valley and its culture, another tech podcast with venture capitalist hosts, “Acquired,” delves into what’s happened before. “The most curious, passionate people about building the future want to learn the lessons of the past,” co-host Ben Gilbert explained to me.  

The pod runs long—three or four hours, all worth it—with heavily researched, fascinating stories of already legendary companies as told by Gilbert and his co-host, David Rosenthal. “Acquired” has been around for a while, but the duo has doubled down on their storytelling and nailed the pod’s long-form format. I especially liked their Andreessen Horowitz episode, which dug deep into Ben Horowitz’s family history with the San Francisco counterculture. And some of Gilbert and Rosenthal’s most insightful episodes have focused on slightly less obvious subjects, like LVMH and Taylor Swift. Gilbert originally worried that any drift away from Silicon Valley might alienate the pod’s audience. Instead, he said, those episodes have been total “catnip,” with the pod’s tech audience going all in on those less familiar corporate histories.—M.M.

Reading: Twitter’s Astonishing Tempest

When I reached tech reporter Zoë Schiffer this week, she made clear to me that her new book, “Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk’s Twitter,” due out Tuesday, would present “a story you just can’t get anywhere else” rather than another Musk biography.

Using conversations with more than 60 current and former employees from across the firm now called X, Schiffer presents a 360-degree view of one of the nastiest corporate raids ever: “It’s the story of the breakdown of a company’s stated values—and how they actually play out in the product development process.” So is X really a company that believes in meritocratic free speech? Just ask the team of engineers who stayed up all night tweaking an algorithm to artificially elevate Musk’s own voice.

As for the social network’s future, “I don’t see a scenario under which X has a complete revamp and is able to come out looking like a better version of what Twitter used to be,” Schiffer said. Instead, she suspects Musk’s real focus lies on xAI, his artificial intelligence startup, which is training its large language model on X user data. Here’s hoping Schiffer documents the inevitable xAI saga, too.—Julia Black

Watching: The Hong Kong Riche 

Like the sprawling metropolis it inhabits, “Expats” is many things—most prominently a haunting exploration of modern Hong Kong and a condemnation of how catastrophe affects the rich and the poor so differently. The Amazon series hasn’t achieved much buzz since its Jan. 26 debut, a real pity considering the deft touch brought by creator Lulu Wang, director of 2019’s “The Farewell,” and the contribution of headlining star Nicole Kidman. Kidman’s character, Margaret, is a wealthy, grieving wife ensconced high up in a luxury tower called The Peak, who finds her life overlapping with that of her neighbor Hilary (Sarayu Blue) and of the enigmatic Mercy (Ji-young Yoo). The couple of episodes I’ve seen haven’t fully revealed the exact connections between this trio, but I look forward to seeing the mystery unravel in a locale we don’t see much on television.—A.B.

Makes You Think

Well, it has been "every day low prices" in crypto for years now!