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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…
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It'd be nice to hear their version of this before I bother to get my butt off the couch and pick my pitchfork. The fact that fee increases weren't communicated because the OP was't subed to promo emails just doesn't smell right. As is the fact that it wasn't obvious from the actual billing statements. Ps. I remember their CEO (David Barrett) back from the p2p-hackers mailing list days. He ain't one of them Zuckerberg…
David's a hardcore coder and a talented technologist, for sure, but... well, he believes whatever he believes at the moment very strongly. He has a very solid reality-distortion field. As an example, he really believed it was fine to have mechanical turk freelancers see people's receipts. He would say something to the effect of "people throw their receipts in the garbage where any sanitation worker can see them - thi…
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It'd be nice to hear their version of this before I bother to get my butt off the couch and pick my pitchfork. The fact that fee increases weren't communicated because the OP was't subed to promo emails just doesn't smell right. As is the fact that it wasn't obvious from the actual billing statements. Ps. I remember their CEO (David Barrett) back from the p2p-hackers mailing list days. He ain't one of them Zuckerberg…
> He ain't one of them Zuckerbergs. The exact opposite in fact. I am not saying otherwise, just objectively speaking: money changes people.
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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…
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.
> Prior to the completion of this offering, all of our outstanding shares of LT10 and LT50 common stock, representing approximately % of the combined voting power and % of the economic interest in us immediately following the completion of this offering, will be contributed by the beneficial holders of such shares (the “Trust Beneficiaries”) to a new voting trust (the "Voting Trust”) formed pursuant to a voting trust…
Dual-class can be beneficial first few years. They provide smooth transition from private to public company. If if there is not a sunset clause, they start performing worse. Performance of Corporate Royalty degrades over time without pressure from other shareholders.
Perpetual Dual-Class Stock: The Case Against Corporate Royalty https://www.sec.gov/news/speech/perpetual-dual-class-stock-c...
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…
It even went to foreign customers. Pretty gross misuse of customer data in my view.
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…
They have a reasonable claim to blame COVID, but their story is basically one of successfully increasing price.
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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…
How can you steal something from an account by looking at the receipt? I mean, receipts are being thrown out in piles, if that was possible i'd become rich just by digging in a dumpster near a convenience store.
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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.
You can see this thread when the project got open sourced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12739771 . The CEO's handle is quinthar.
Amusingly, see this Twitter thread from aphyr, a respected known name in the DB field: https://twitter.com/aphyr/status/788755301151477760 and https://twitter.com/aphyr/status/788757992829222912, where he is surprised that the author don't know about basic concepts of distributed systems, such as CAP and IOPS.