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…
Hah - the idea of changes to your contractual billing rate being classified as marketing emails... one really does see something new everyday in tech...
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…
Or people jumping ship because of the CEO's "muh fascism" email sent to all customers.
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 stic…
I get recruiters from companies big and small spamming my inbox, my voicemails, and even sending me SMS messages multiple times a week (if not multiple times a day). It's really not a big deal that a company CEO sent out one email which accurately warned people that Trump was a danger to democracy.
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 e…
I don't think this is Concur - I'm pretty sure this is your accounting team. Frequently the software change coincides with an outsourcing effort, so they're not being paid to be helpful, they're being paid to apply the policy as written.
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.
There weren’t originally, but eventually there was a dev QA team mostly surmised of folks in the UP. Dunno what years you were there, but the smartscan folks were all just hourly contracts from the local college.
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 stic…
I get recruiters from companies big and small spamming my inbox, my voicemails, and even sending me SMS messages multiple times a week (if not multiple times a day). It's really not a big deal that a company CEO sent out one email which accurately warned people that Trump was a danger to democracy.
He said anything less than a vote for Biden is a vote against democracy. In fact, being anti-democratic is believing in a system against anything but vote for a single favored party. Mr. Barrett is anti-democratic.
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.
To be fair, it was basically an MVP. It did everything it needed to and nothing more the entire time I worked on it. Definitely didn’t love it, but it did expose me to cool problems to work on.
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…
Ah so _that's_ why it was so good. So often I find these 'AI' systems are just smoke and mirrors. You have a great system, nobody is interested. Sprinkle on some 'ai' magic beans, and people are now throwing money at you.
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…
There were some horror stories in YC about staff running certain receipts thru expensify, leading to bank or bitcoin accounts being penetrated and stolen. I have to concur - i've had the ability to steer companies away from their product. Expensify was OK before all the OCR stuff and shady billing. Now with the S1 filing, whatever good designers and engineering talent they had will bail, and the company will be a hol…
> There were some horror stories in YC about staff running certain receipts thru expensify, leading to bank or bitcoin accounts being penetrated and stolen.
Can you cite this? I couldn't find anything seems obscure to search though.
Seems insane to me that a receipt leads to funds stolen.
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.
I used to work at a company that used Concur. Some of my co-workers wouldn't bother with expensing a lot of expensible stuff because dealing with Concur wasn't worth it to them. I wonder if this phenomenon saves the company a significant amount of money.