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Expensify S-1

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Re: Expensify S-1

#21

Post by systemvoltage »

dpeck wrote: post #11
bgorman wrote: post #6

Expensify’s CEO sent a letter to every single person Expensify had an email for, even simple ground floor employees who just use the software to submit expenses an email prior to the 2020 presidential election. The CEO sent a long diatribe about how the election of Donald Trump would be the end of democracy as we know it, and it is imperative that Joe Biden is elected. I will never give this company a single cent aft…

On the contrary this is exactly what I want to see from executives regardless of their political leanings. If they believe that something is a clear and direct threat to the business that they’re charged with running, they should have a fiduciary duty to speak up on it in whatever means they have available. Following that those receiving the message can decide to continue to support the business or not. But I’d rathe…

It’s not a fiduciary duty to comment on presidential election to their own employees and dig a political stake.

Re: Expensify S-1

#22

Post by bastardoperator »

Anything that can reduce SAP Concur adoption is a win in my book. Expensify is so much nicer to use if you're on the hook for tracking your own expenses. I love the fact that they'll scan receipts and enter the data for you.

Re: Expensify S-1

#23

Post by Spivak »

twostorytower wrote: post #9
bgorman wrote: post #6

Expensify’s CEO sent a letter to every single person Expensify had an email for, even simple ground floor employees who just use the software to submit expenses an email prior to the 2020 presidential election. The CEO sent a long diatribe about how the election of Donald Trump would be the end of democracy as we know it, and it is imperative that Joe Biden is elected. I will never give this company a single cent aft…

The way I try to put my views aside when thinking about how I feel about this is "if a CEO with the opposite political view did this, how would I feel?" and it's very clear it would make me very unhappy. So yeah, this is definitely not an okay thing for a CEO to do.

Yeah, the right thing to do is to "quietly" announce your company's political views in the "subtext" of all your marketing materials, social media posts, company culture, and job descriptions.

People really do seem to forget how crazy the natural social separation is between the red and blue tribes is in the US. The CEO didn't really have to send an email for me to who they were voting for.

If you're okay with companies really obviously announcing their political affiliations in literally everything they do but not okay with companies being explicit about what everyone already knows then I think that says more about you than the company. Expensify is straight up not at all politically neutral, never has been, and doesn't really even pretend to. This wasn't a rogue CEO -- the employees voted on and helped write the email.

Re: Expensify S-1

#24

Post by justicezyx »

nattaylor wrote: post #3

I still marvel that they've built such a big company around a SQLite fork. >Expensify is built on Bedrock - a private Blockchain-based data foundation atop a custom fork of SQLite, which we believe is the fastest, most reliable and most widely distributed database in the world. This fork optimizes SQLite to operate on extremely high core density servers, concurrently executing thousands of page-locked transactions pe…

> I still marvel that they've built such a big company around a SQLite fork.

> Expensify is built on Bedrock - a private Blockchain-based data foundation atop a custom fork of SQLite

This seems just that they use Bedrock, which itself is a blockchain data foundation (whatever that means I have not much idea), then that thing uses SQLite fork.

For me this is more like someone uses ABSL or MYSQL. Not build around it, but just a small piece of tech.

Re: Expensify S-1

#25

Post by tomlor »

I singlehandledly forced the replacement of Expensify at my company after some dodgy billing practices. They incrementally, yet substantially, raised our bill over a period of eight months with no notification to us whatsover. It was hard to detect because our bills were already variable values per month (based on active users).

When I discovered the higher rates we were paying I reached out to support and they said I wasn't notified because I elected to opt out of marketing emails. They wouldn't issue a credit either.

I threatened to cancel service and they truly couldn't have cared less. So we dumped them. Very satisfying. It's a shame - the product was ok. But from my persepctive, F these guys.

Re: Expensify S-1

#26

Post by jiveturkey »

bmiller2 wrote: post #16

When my startup was acquired, we had to migrate from using Expensify to some god-awful corporate nonsense (SAP Concur). Lord, how I miss Expensify. It was the epitome of intuitive. It makes me sad that Expensify was not a first-mover in this space. Once SAP or whatever garbage-ware gets baked into corporate enterprise architecture, it takes an act of God (or equivalently the CTO's dedicated focus) to replace it.

wrong POV. for each individual user, the increased aggravation is tolerable. For the corporate controller, at megacorps you [apparently] need to use concur and the like. at the level of megacorp, financials must be correctly stated, auditable, and so forth.

kind of like security. why can't you just _trust_ your users to set a strong password and have a screen saver iff they are in an environment where it's helpful?

it's fun (and easy) to pick on concur but the goals of it are completely different than the goals of expensify.

Re: Expensify S-1

#27

Post by itsoktocry »

dpeck wrote: post #11
bgorman wrote: post #6

Expensify’s CEO sent a letter to every single person Expensify had an email for, even simple ground floor employees who just use the software to submit expenses an email prior to the 2020 presidential election. The CEO sent a long diatribe about how the election of Donald Trump would be the end of democracy as we know it, and it is imperative that Joe Biden is elected. I will never give this company a single cent aft…

On the contrary this is exactly what I want to see from executives regardless of their political leanings. If they believe that something is a clear and direct threat to the business that they’re charged with running, they should have a fiduciary duty to speak up on it in whatever means they have available. Following that those receiving the message can decide to continue to support the business or not. But I’d rathe…

>But I’d rather have that than the weasel word non answers approach that many execs take.

They are free to do whatever they want, but the CEO is a representative of the company, not the company itself. I don't care one wink about what the guy handling my business expenses thinks of the POTUS. His opinion on such matters has zero value to me. It was an odd thing to do for any company which is storing sensitive data of its customers.

Re: Expensify S-1

#28

Post by bastardoperator »

bgorman wrote: post #6

Expensify’s CEO sent a letter to every single person Expensify had an email for, even simple ground floor employees who just use the software to submit expenses an email prior to the 2020 presidential election. The CEO sent a long diatribe about how the election of Donald Trump would be the end of democracy as we know it, and it is imperative that Joe Biden is elected. I will never give this company a single cent aft…

Considering Trump supporters at the Capitol tried and failed to end democracy on Jan 6th, was it a really a stunt or was he 100% correct in his assessment?

Re: Expensify S-1

#29

Post by dljsjr »

justicezyx wrote: post #24
nattaylor wrote: post #3

I still marvel that they've built such a big company around a SQLite fork. >Expensify is built on Bedrock - a private Blockchain-based data foundation atop a custom fork of SQLite, which we believe is the fastest, most reliable and most widely distributed database in the world. This fork optimizes SQLite to operate on extremely high core density servers, concurrently executing thousands of page-locked transactions pe…

> I still marvel that they've built such a big company around a SQLite fork. > Expensify is built on Bedrock - a private Blockchain-based data foundation atop a custom fork of SQLite This seems just that they use Bedrock, which itself is a blockchain data foundation (whatever that means I have not much idea), then that thing uses SQLite fork. For me this is more like someone uses ABSL or MYSQL. Not build around it, b…

That’s not totally fair, though, because Expensify created Bedrock. So it seems that a good bit of their engineering effort has gone in to this technology.

Re: Expensify S-1

#30

Post by nemo44x »

zht wrote: post #12

I still remember when "reimburse me in bitcoin" was an option in the early days. Quite the interesting company

I still have the bitcoin from that era! They created a Coinbase account for you I think. Regardless, I still have access to it. Was the best expense report I ever filed!
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