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Expensify S-1

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Re: Expensify S-1

#61

Post by mikysco »

epistasis wrote: post #46

Having to fill in many forms this morning, I was just marveling at how unnecessarily painful data entry is with Expensify. If I want to select the current autocomplete for the vendor, do I press Enter? Nope, that saves the whole expense and exits back to the list. If I want to autocomplete other fields, do I press enter? Yes, that works! What's the difference? Who knows? Who cares? Clearly not anybody on the web dev…

My lord the UX decisions Expensify makes are irritating. They recently changed their web login flow; it now forces users to select whether they'd like to login with email, phone, google, apple... each time they login.

Re: Expensify S-1

#62

Post by jpleger »

xmprt wrote: post #60
dhruvkar wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I imagine OP is probably selling countertops or maybe even something with required precision like granite surface plates.

Typically durable goods will have less revenue than software services, since there isn't really the concept of logarithmic growth that you can theoretically support with software.

Re: Expensify S-1

#63

Post by Nextgrid »

brianwawok wrote: post #32
MangoCoffee wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we use Concur (1500+ employees). not my cup of tea but the accounting people love it.

Which is the classic startup story of you need to build your product for the user that is paying your bill. Even if that means subjecting the actual end users to misery…

That's IMO a short-sighted strategy. You might get somewhere but you're opening yourself up to disruption by someone who can reconcile and satisfy both end-users' and clients' requirements.

Re: Expensify S-1

#64

Post by lugged »

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…

We're also still reeling from the smartscan debacle.

The thing that pissed me off the most is when they emailed some unsolicited BLM propoganda out to every one of our employees.

Re: Expensify S-1

#65

Post by JaakkoP »

I was surprised to see Expensify's revenue growth was only 8% YoY from 2019 to 2020. For comparison, Asana and GitLab had ~85% year-over-year growth on their S-1.

Granted, Expensify grew 60% over the last twelve months, but by their own account it was 'primarily due to a pricing change implemented in May 2020, which led to a gradual increase in per member price for our paid members"

Makes me wonder if they are being hit hard by the new entrants like Ramp, or if the pandemic had such a major impact on all expense management platforms as people travel less - especially on business?

Re: Expensify S-1

#66

Post by brianwawok »

Nextgrid wrote: post #63
brianwawok wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is the classic startup story of you need to build your product for the user that is paying your bill. Even if that means subjecting the actual end users to misery…

That's IMO a short-sighted strategy. You might get somewhere but you're opening yourself up to disruption by someone who can reconcile and satisfy both end-users' and clients' requirements.

A lot of companies have made billions following it. See oracle etc. so maybe short sighted, but I think Larry is doing OK

Re: Expensify S-1

#67

Post by temp1634592138 »

dljsjr wrote: post #29
justicezyx wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The CEO created Bedrock. The engineers have to maintain it because it is the CEO's pet project, and the CEO always knows best. Nobody there really loved it.

Re: Expensify S-1

#68

Post by lugged »

Spivak wrote: post #23
twostorytower wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compan…

Its political prosthelytizing.

What you're ignoring is that 99% of our employees don't have the ability to cease doing business with these holier than thou assholes. They're forced to get these emails they don't want and they all spent time being being mad, annoyed, confused or upset, many spent hours crafting internal emails and following the very public discussion, many were annoyed by the eventual decision to stick with them. Many still bring this up when related issues arise. It's a collective waste of time and it isn't ok.

Would you be happy about a company that sent religious recruitment emails to all your employees?

Would you be happy about a company that distracted over half your employees for the better part of a day in some cases for no fucking reason other than to push their own personal agenda?

Re: Expensify S-1

#69

Post by ghaff »

MangoCoffee wrote: post #31
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…

we use Concur (1500+ employees). not my cup of tea but the accounting people love it.

My experience with Concur is that the product itself is not bad. Not great but not bad once you get used to it. (Fir example, there's a lot of random information asked for that varies by category which is annoying but you get used to it.) The problem is with the auditing on the Concur side, whoever's "fault" it is.

Things like any date discrepancies between the receipt and how it's entered on the report get bounced even if they're off by a day even though it's obvious and, pre-Concur, would have just been fixed in-house. Also random invocations of travel policies cause rejections rather than not just making a trivial connection. Simply not reading comments with respect to exceptions. Etc. I'm sure hundreds of hours of highly-paid people's time gets wasted.

Re: Expensify S-1

#70

Post by othertemp1234 »

temp1634592138 wrote: post #67
dljsjr wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The CEO created Bedrock. The engineers have to maintain it because it is the CEO's pet project, and the CEO always knows best. Nobody there really loved it.

I can second this. It's a cool bit of technology. They labeled it "blockchain" way after the fact because it kinda-sorta resembles a blockchain, but it was never really that. It was a distributed replication layer on top of SQL. I remember it constantly breaking. Your description fits well: CEO's pet project that no one else really loved. I have to imagine they've got it pretty stable by now, though.
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