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Expensify S-1

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101–110 of 123 posts

Re: Expensify S-1

#101
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…

Isn’t such an e-mail subject to and potentially in violation of election campaign and financing laws? Not to mention the CAN SPAM act.

Re: Expensify S-1

#102
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…

Claiming that such a notice is marketing email sounds illegal. Changing pricing silently without notice or consent sounds a lot like fraud.

Re: Expensify S-1

#103
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well imagine if it were the other way around, a white supremacist is president and a CEO sends out letters praising that...

[deleted]

Re: Expensify S-1

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Here is an example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15821976

Re: Expensify S-1

#105
post #83
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Whataboutism and condescension, nice.

I watched the discussion, people were obviously distracted and upset. Reading a 5 minute email wasn't the issue, the fallout was.

Random recruiters aren't causing confusion many wide outrage and distraction.

Re: Expensify S-1

#106
post #105
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Whataboutism and condescension, nice. I watched the discussion, people were obviously distracted and upset. Reading a 5 minute email wasn't the issue, the fallout was. Random recruiters aren't causing confusion many wide outrage and distraction.

Let me put it very simply. Trump is a dangerous despot. Anyone who opened their eyes for a day between his inauguration and now can see that. And if you believe as I do that the most powerful country in the world shouldn’t have a despot at the head of its military and federal police, then you should do everything in your power to persuade people that he is who you know him to be.

If you’re not persuaded by democracy then how about free markets? Trump has gone after multiple companies for political reasons. I mean, the guy told everyone to boycott Goodyear Tire while he was President ffs. It is absolutely reasonable to assume your company is better off when they dont have to kiss the ass of a despot in order to keep your comapny’s stock price level.

It’s so incredibly sad how quickly we normalized that man’s politics.

Re: Expensify S-1

#107
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…

One of my coworkers praised this in Slack that they wish more people have the courage to do this.

I am like: what are you saying? You would load all customer emails in order to push your political belief? I didn't say that out loud. But that was what I was thinking.

And we work at a financial company where personal data, arguably, is the most important thing.

Re: Expensify S-1

#108
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

I agree that the CEO is not the company and should not use the company as an amplifier of their own personal beliefs or views. That being said, I don't buy that you (or anyone, I am not pointing fingers) _don't care one wink_. Maybe you don't care on this very topic because you disagree or simply have no interest in politics. But I'm willing to bet that on another topic closer to your heart (pick your favourite), tha…

It makes sense that the CEO should communicate to employees the effects of politics on the company, but it's unreasonable to send this to your customers.

Re: Expensify S-1

#109

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…

Wow, that covers basically every buzz word and sounds terrible.

Expensify also is the type of app that would scale really well with a traditional rdbms, so im not sure what the point is.

Re: Expensify S-1

#110

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…

What’s the point of building this in-house over using an existing solution? Is there some particular use case that a replicated SQLite is good at?
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