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Expensify S-1

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Re: Expensify S-1

#51

Post by pc86 »

namdnay wrote: post #15
ttymck wrote: post #5

$50M in revenue on 130 employees seems quite remarkable, no? Not to mention they grew to $88M with the same headcount. Are they uniquely able to outsource a large number of functions? I've worked for firms with far less revenue and far greater headcount, and the road to IPO seemed inextricably dependent on orders of magnitude more headcount.

That doesn’t seem huge? 50M for 130 is a bit less than 400k revenue per employee. Of that revenue you’re already spending at least 100-200k on the employee themselves

For some of the devs, sure, but no way is their average payroll per employee $200k. How many analysts and support staff work there? I'm sure there are people at Expensify making $30-50k/yr.

Re: Expensify S-1

#52

Post by temp1634592138 »

rexreed wrote: post #41
tomlor wrote: post #25

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…

Not to mention their shady and undisclosed practices of using humans to read receipts when they pretend it's AI / OCR / NLP doing that. "Expensify has admitted that its declared AI product SmartScan, which is assumed to scan the expense receipts and categorize the details into corresponding expense pool through a machine process, was actually assisted by humans. Breaching privacy of users, the receipts were posted on…

I worked at Expensify a few years ago. Except for some email and PDFs, the process is entirely manual. The justification is that humans just do it better with a reasonable and predictable cost.

Re: Expensify S-1

#53

Post by 999900000999 »

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…

I lean left and this is still disgusting. Not everyone needs to agree with everyone. This seems like something an intern would do.

Re: Expensify S-1

#54

Post by temp1634592138 »

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…

It has been a while since I left the company, but back then the blockchain is essentially a checksum on previous executed commands. Bedrock uses (used?) command logging as way to propagate changes. That is, they store the SQL in a table and apply the same command on all nodes, with a single master being responsible to be the canonical version.

Re: Expensify S-1

#55

Post by dublinben »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #13
Spartan-S63 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like par for the course nowadays for companies to issue two classes of stock with the second class having little to no voting power.

I hate this, but us purchasers have no one but ourselves to blame.

The major index providers (FTSE Russell, MSCI, and S&P Dow Jones) have either banned or restricted stocks like this from their indexes. If you stick to mutual funds or ETFs that track these indexes, then you're speaking with your money by avoiding these stocks.

https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2018/08/22/dual-class-index-...

Re: Expensify S-1

#56

Post by ygjb »

epistasis wrote: post #42
ygjb wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Is it because you disagree with the political leanings of the CEO? Is it because you don't think that corporations should express political biases? If so, do you maintain a list of companies that you won't do business with based on corporate donations? Is it because you disagree with a founder or CEO using the platform that their company provides them to amplify their voice? Your comment is a condemnation of the…

If the email had been in support of Trump, I would feel similarly about not wanting to do business with Expensify, so I can sort of see where OP is coming from. I would feel much less strongly, but also have a distaste in my mouth, if the CEO emailed in support of Romney or McCain during those elections. Political advocacy can complicate business relations, and its best for everybody to realize that. Which isn't to s…

> Which isn't to say that one should avoid political advocacy, just that the costs should be evaluated before deciding to do it or to not do it.

It is pretty clear that the decision to write the email was written with business impacts in mind. Two of the longer paragraphs are essentially business justifications for why he wrote the email.

Re: Expensify S-1

#57

Post by pydry »

paxys wrote: post #48
jiveturkey wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? i…

It's almost always a case of "no one got fired for buying IBM". Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Cisco and the like are all entrenched in the business world because no one wants to be the guy to move the company over to a smaller, better, cheaper alternative just because there is a chance it could fail and their jobs would be on the line.

At least in the situations I've seen the salespeople made effective use of FUD and ego massage on less technical managers.

It wouldnt be nearly as effective though, if they werent playing the long game and if the products they sold didnt each function to increase the vendor lockin one step at a time.

There ought to be good money decoupling corporate IT systems from these systems but weirdly nobody seems to care that much about IT spend on preferred vendors.

Re: Expensify S-1

#58

Post by temp1634592138 »

MisradHaOtzer wrote: post #10

Very impressive quirky company. In 2013-2014 they found smart ways to be a non valley company (recruiting in UP Michigan). Really bold CEO!

Not sure what is bold about that. The people in UP Michigan are some of the ones doing the SmartScan back office, and customer support. AFAICT there were no product/engineering people there.

Re: Expensify S-1

#59

Post by tcas »

tomlor wrote: post #25

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 got hit by the same year long gradual bill increase. I didn't notice at first, as the number seemed right, but then at 6 months or so I looked into why the price seemed so much higher than what I remember and got really upset.

When I looked into it, it seemed as though they restructured their plans multiple times during the ~4 years I was paying them, and I got placed into the most expensive option which was originally the same price as what I started with. I was also locked into a year long commitment at some point, and they wouldn't budge on letting me downgrade to the lower plan mid year (I didn't have a use for any of the advanced features).

The support chat told me the same thing about the changes being announced via marketing emails, and said they could not credit, cancel or downgrade my plan. The support agent also couldn't care less when I said it would cause me to cancel my plan at renewal.

The whole experience left me with a really bad impression, I went from a huge advocate to telling everyone to avoid them.

Re: Expensify S-1

#60

Post by xmprt »

dhruvkar wrote: post #34
ttymck wrote: post #5

$50M in revenue on 130 employees seems quite remarkable, no? Not to mention they grew to $88M with the same headcount. Are they uniquely able to outsource a large number of functions? I've worked for firms with far less revenue and far greater headcount, and the road to IPO seemed inextricably dependent on orders of magnitude more headcount.

We're at $11M on 35 employees slinging physical stone slabs. I'd expect a software company to be much higher on $rev/employee.

Wouldn't hardware revenue be much higher than software revenue because costs are equally high?
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