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Expensify S-1

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Re: Expensify S-1

#91

Post by jdmg94 »

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 remember working on a call center that did their bill reviews, it was all poorly compensated people

Re: Expensify S-1

#92

Post by osrec »

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 tried building an AI/OCR style receipt digitisation system into my SaaS (https://usebx.com). Let me tell you, it was not easy at all. So much so, that I doubt the problem can be solved efficiently at scale without using humans. In the end, we even considered using Amazon mechanical turk, but it just wasn't worth the hassle.

At the time, I was also amazed beyond words at what Expensify and similar companies claimed to have achieved with their "AI". I find it somewhat comforting to know that they lied and it was mostly manual!

Re: Expensify S-1

#93

Post by ttymck »

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

The current number is $88M. For comparison: Gitlab did $150M on 1,400 employees.

Re: Expensify S-1

#94

Post by StratusBen »

Two interesting things I noticed:

* CEO salary is pretty high at $933,072 - I feel like normally you see CEO salary top-off at $400k and then majorly weighted with equity.

* Redpoint, their Series A investor, sold out of the majority (maybe all?) of their stock in 2018: "In March 2018, we entered into a Stock Redemption Agreement with Redpoint Associates IV, LLC and Redpoint Ventures IV, L.P. (together, “Redpoint”) pursuant to which we repurchased 1,616,947 shares of our Series B Preferred Stock, 46,952 shares of our Series B-1 Preferred Stock and 118,251 shares of our Series C Preferred Stock from Redpoint for an aggregate purchase price of $43,605,464. As a result of the repurchase, Redpoint no longer beneficially owned more than 5% of our capital stock or had the right to designate a member of our board of directors."

Re: Expensify S-1

#95

Post by missedthecue »

ttymck wrote: post #93
namdnay wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The current number is $88M. For comparison: Gitlab did $150M on 1,400 employees.

And sure enough, GitLab doesn't even make an operating profit.

Re: Expensify S-1

#96

Post by dhruvkar »

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?

You could sell $5 fidget spinners or $500,000 Rolls Royces. Costs would be highly dependent on the industry/product.

However, what's limiting is that physical goods depend on physical distribution.

Theoretically, software's available market is the entire planet. Physical goods only go where you can physically send (and support) your product.

All else being equal, distribution plays a larger role in the discrepancy between physical vs. software.

Re: Expensify S-1

#97

Post by 55555 »

lugged wrote: post #64
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.

HelpScout does this too.

Re: Expensify S-1

#98

Post by JaakkoP »

pwned1 wrote: post #82
JaakkoP wrote: post #65

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.

If anything, based on these numbers the email increased their sales. I highly doubt there’s an actual causation, but personally speaking having a CEO take a stance I agree with would have made me check out their product.

Re: Expensify S-1

#99

Post by kyleee »

Spivak wrote: post #18
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…

Penzeys Spices is also really well-known political activism and it seems to be working for them -- it's just part of their brand now to get emails from an impassioned CEO who really really hated Trump and willing to put his money where his mouth is to the tune of almost a million dollars last election. So many people vowed to boycott them but it never really came to anything and they made a nice profit off of trollin…

Their spices are great, but yeah definitely unsubscribe

Re: Expensify S-1

#100

Post by epistasis »

fuzzer37 wrote: post #74
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…

I've worked in web development space as a QA, and verifying that web forms are 508 compliant is a big deal if you want to sell anything to the government. Do they just never expect to get any Federal contracts and sell exclusively to private companies, or what?

I have no idea if 508 compliance does anything to help. After 10 minutes of reading, all I have found are nonsense websites that have not specified a single concrete aspect of what it might mean, except putting alt text in images.

I've certainly heard of 508 in the context of WCAG, but I don't know what benefit it could give unless it actually prescribed accelerator keys with consistent visual hints about what it those accelerator keys would be.

Web designers and developers spend way too much time mucking with React or other frameworks, spoiling the natural usability of web browsers. They are more concerned with restyling forms away from the platform's native, visually identifiable controls, than they are with making forms usable or speedy or consistent.

Old terminal based text entry systems were so much better at data entry than the crap we've built since then. I really wish that at least one web framework would take this seriously, given how prevalent web based data system are. Instead, we get a constant churn of harder to use, slower, and more and more abstract web frameworks.

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