[HN Gopher] Expensify S-1
___________________________________________________________________
Expensify S-1
Author : mattmarcus
Score : 78 points
Date : 2021-10-18 18:36 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sec.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sec.gov)
| zht wrote:
| I still remember when "reimburse me in bitcoin" was an option in
| the early days.
|
| Quite the interesting company
| nemo44x wrote:
| I still have the bitcoin from that era! They created a Coinbase
| account for you I think. Regardless, I still have access to it.
| Was the best expense report I ever filed!
| bgorman wrote:
| 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 after that stunt.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I feel that means the email did exactly what it was supposed
| to:
|
| - Encourage those that agree with it - Inform those who
| disagree or are uncertain/unfamiliar - Provide honest, clear
| message on what they stand for and priorities
|
| Assuming they aren't surprised / are willing to bear
| consequences for their actions (both positive and negative),
| that's great. That's small-business mentality - openness with
| clients, making a stance, standing for more than just profit.
| Compare that with typical corporate communication which has
| such low informational density content it's worse than useless,
| and I miss it. And again, I say that on any given side of an
| issue (whether I disagree or disagree; and hopefully there's
| more than such a limited binary choice). If you CARE about it,
| don't hide it and pretend otherwise - Just makes discussions
| and decisions and life more onerous/hypocritical/annoying.
| ygjb wrote:
| Why?
|
| Is it because you disagree with the political leanings of the
| CEO?
|
| Is it because you don't think that corporations should express
| political biases?
|
| If so, do you maintain a list of companies that you won't do
| business with based on corporate donations?
|
| Is it because you disagree with a founder or CEO using the
| platform that their company provides them to amplify their
| voice?
|
| Your comment is a condemnation of the action of the CEO without
| any specific concern raised about the action taken, and leaves
| one to conclude that you are a Trump supporter. That is also
| fine - the whole point of democracy is to allow people to
| choose who they vote for.
| epistasis wrote:
| If the email had been in support of Trump, I would feel
| similarly about not wanting to do business with Expensify, so
| I can sort of see where OP is coming from. I would feel much
| less strongly, but also have a distaste in my mouth, if the
| CEO emailed in support of Romney or McCain during those
| elections.
|
| Political advocacy can complicate business relations, and its
| best for everybody to realize that. Which isn't to say that
| one should avoid political advocacy, just that the costs
| should be evaluated before deciding to do it or to not do it.
| ygjb wrote:
| > Which isn't to say that one should avoid political
| advocacy, just that the costs should be evaluated before
| deciding to do it or to not do it.
|
| It is pretty clear that the decision to write the email was
| written with business impacts in mind. Two of the longer
| paragraphs are essentially business justifications for why
| he wrote the email.
| missedthecue wrote:
| If I give an organisation my personal data (contact
| information), and they use it to tell me their personal
| political opinions, no matter how valid, I would not
| appreciate that.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| What default-opt-it dark pattern did they employ to get people
| to agree to that sort of contact?
| sushid wrote:
| I feel like HN users reflexively downvoted this comment but it
| does have merit. Personally, I'm no supporter or Trump or his
| right-wing viewpoints but even I felt slightly uncomfortable
| with the CEO's decision to send such an email.
| paxys wrote:
| If you want to only use services where the company or its
| employees are not pushing any political agenda, I have some bad
| news for you.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I lean left and this is still disgusting. Not everyone needs to
| agree with everyone. This seems like something an intern would
| do.
| purple_ferret wrote:
| Yes, I MUCH rather they try to swing elections by depositing
| large sums of cash into candidates' pockets
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Considering Trump supporters at the Capitol tried and failed to
| end democracy on Jan 6th, was it a really a stunt or was he
| 100% correct in his assessment?
| missedthecue wrote:
| Being correct doesn't retroactively make misuse of customer's
| personal data OK
| mynameishere wrote:
| They were actually protesting what they thought was a stolen
| election, ie, the "end of democracy". See how we're all on
| the same side rhetorically? We all want democracy.
| missedthecue wrote:
| It even went to foreign customers. Pretty gross misuse of
| customer data in my view.
| Spivak wrote:
| 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 trolling Trump
| supporters.
| cityzen wrote:
| i mean... was he wrong?
| twostorytower wrote:
| 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.
| Spivak wrote:
| 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 companies really obviously announcing
| their political affiliations in literally everything they do
| but not okay with companies being explicit about what
| everyone already knows then I think that says more about you
| than the company. Expensify is straight up not at all
| politically neutral, never has been, and doesn't really even
| pretend to. This wasn't a rogue CEO -- the employees voted on
| and helped write the email.
| lugged wrote:
| 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?
| dpeck wrote:
| 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 rather have
| that than the weasel word non answers approach that many execs
| take.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| It's not a fiduciary duty to comment on presidential election
| _to their own employees_ and dig a political stake.
| curiousgal wrote:
| Well imagine if it were the other way around, a white
| supremacist is president and a CEO sends out letters praising
| that...
| dpeck wrote:
| That'd be great, it would inform my decision to cease doing
| business with that CEO/company as quickly as possible.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _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 of its customers.
| xcambar wrote:
| 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),
| that could reflect on your views and relationship with the
| company.
|
| And actually, because the voice of a CEO is globally
| impactful on the brand of the company, CEOs tend to be
| publicly rather quiet. Exceptions apply.
| pbreit wrote:
| Non-traditional for sure. And I think most PR heads would
| highly discourage. Seems to work for this company OK. Thinking
| different can be an advantage.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Anything that can reduce SAP Concur adoption is a win in my book.
| Expensify is so much nicer to use if you're on the hook for
| tracking your own expenses. I love the fact that they'll scan
| receipts and enter the data for you.
| JaakkoP wrote:
| 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?
| htrp wrote:
| > 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 agreement
| (the "Voting Trust Agreement"), under which all decisions with
| respect to the voting (but not the disposition) of such shares of
| LT10 and LT50 common stock, as well as any other shares of any
| class of common stock held in the Voting Trust from time to time,
| will be made by the trustees of the Voting Trust (the "Trustees")
| in their sole and absolute discretion, with no responsibility
| under the Voting Trust Agreement as stockholder, trustee or
| otherwise, except for his or her own individual malfeasance. The
| initial Trustees of the Voting Trust will be David Barrett, our
| CEO, Ryan Schaffer, our CFO, and Jason Mills, our Chief Product
| Officer. The Voting Trust and its Trustees will, for the
| foreseeable future, have significant influence over our corporate
| management and affairs, and will be able to control virtually all
| matters requiring stockholder approval. The Voting Trust is
| irrevocable and terminates upon the earlier of the written
| agreement between us and the Trustees and the date on which all
| shares of LT10 and LT50 common stock automatically convert into
| shares of Class A common stock in accordance with the terms of
| our amended and restated certificate of incorporation, which will
| occur when all of the then-outstanding shares of LT10 and LT50
| common stock represent, in the aggregate, less than 2% of all
| then-outstanding shares of common stock.
|
| For 88 million in Revenue (FY2020)... you can buy the stock and
| have no say at all in how the company is run....
| Spartan-S63 wrote:
| Seems like par for the course nowadays for companies to issue
| two classes of stock with the second class having little to no
| voting power.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| I hate this, but us purchasers have no one but ourselves to
| blame.
| dublinben wrote:
| The major index providers (FTSE Russell, MSCI, and S&P Dow
| Jones) have either banned or restricted stocks like this
| from their indexes. If you stick to mutual funds or ETFs
| that track these indexes, then you're speaking with your
| money by avoiding these stocks.
|
| https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2018/08/22/dual-class-
| index-...
| tomlor wrote:
| 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 I wasn't notified because I elected to
| opt out of marketing emails. They wouldn't issue a credit either.
|
| I threatened to cancel service and they truly couldn't have cared
| less. So we dumped them. Very satisfying. It's a shame - the
| product was ok. But from my persepctive, F these guys.
| tcas wrote:
| I got hit by the same year long gradual bill increase. I didn't
| notice at first, as the number seemed right, but then at 6
| months or so I looked into why the price seemed so much higher
| than what I remember and got really upset.
|
| When I looked into it, it seemed as though they restructured
| their plans multiple times during the ~4 years I was paying
| them, and I got placed into the most expensive option which was
| originally the same price as what I started with. I was also
| locked into a year long commitment at some point, and they
| wouldn't budge on letting me downgrade to the lower plan mid
| year (I didn't have a use for any of the advanced features).
|
| The support chat told me the same thing about the changes being
| announced via marketing emails, and said they could not credit,
| cancel or downgrade my plan. The support agent also couldn't
| care less when I said it would cause me to cancel my plan at
| renewal.
|
| The whole experience left me with a really bad impression, I
| went from a huge advocate to telling everyone to avoid them.
| lugged wrote:
| 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.
| eps wrote:
| 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
| Zuckerbergs. The exact opposite in fact.
| curiousgal wrote:
| > _He ain 't one of them Zuckerbergs. The exact opposite in
| fact._
|
| I am not saying otherwise, just objectively speaking: money
| changes people.
| rexreed wrote:
| 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 freelancing websites where
| freelancers used to take out extracts of information from
| receipts and send it to Expensify team."
|
| [0] https://mantra.ai/blogs/pseudo-ai-when-humans-do-bots-work/
| temp1634592138 wrote:
| I worked at Expensify a few years ago. Except for some email
| and PDFs, the process is entirely manual. The justification
| is that humans just do it better with a reasonable and
| predictable cost.
| bmiller2 wrote:
| 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.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| 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?
|
| it's fun (and easy) to pick on concur but the goals of it are
| completely different than the goals of expensify.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| we use Concur (1500+ employees). not my cup of tea but the
| accounting people love it.
| brianwawok wrote:
| 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...
| Nextgrid wrote:
| 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.
| brianwawok wrote:
| A lot of companies have made billions following it. See
| oracle etc. so maybe short sighted, but I think Larry is
| doing OK
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| paxys wrote:
| It's almost always a case of "no one got fired for buying
| IBM". Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Cisco and the like are all
| entrenched in the business world because no one wants to be
| the guy to move the company over to a smaller, better,
| cheaper alternative just because there is a chance it could
| fail and their jobs would be on the line.
| pydry wrote:
| At least in the situations I've seen the salespeople made
| effective use of FUD and ego massage on less technical
| managers.
|
| It wouldnt be nearly as effective though, if they werent
| playing the long game and if the products they sold didnt
| each function to increase the vendor lockin one step at a
| time.
|
| There ought to be good money decoupling corporate IT
| systems from these systems but weirdly nobody seems to care
| that much about IT spend on preferred vendors.
| nattaylor wrote:
| 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 per server, with robust conflict
| detection and resolution. Bedrock further extends SQLite -- which
| is a local database with no networking component -- with a WAN-
| optimized, Paxos-based self-healing clustered replication engine
| designed to conduct atomic two-phase commits over high-latency /
| low-reliability internet VPN links, using the world's longest
| continuously operational Blockchain (since before Bitcoin began).
| Our design is optimized for global scale, speed and reliability.
| justicezyx wrote:
| > 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, but just a small piece of tech.
| dljsjr wrote:
| 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.
| nattaylor wrote:
| Yeah, from Bedrockdb.com:
|
| >Bedrock was built by Expensify, and is a networking and
| distributed transaction layer built atop SQLite, the
| fastest, most reliable, and most widely distributed
| database in the world.
| temp1634592138 wrote:
| 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.
| temp1634592138 wrote:
| It has been a while since I left the company, but back then
| the blockchain is essentially a checksum on previous executed
| commands. Bedrock uses (used?) command logging as way to
| propagate changes. That is, they store the SQL in a table and
| apply the same command on all nodes, with a single master
| being responsible to be the canonical version.
| MisradHaOtzer wrote:
| Very impressive quirky company.
|
| In 2013-2014 they found smart ways to be a non valley company
| (recruiting in UP Michigan). Really bold CEO!
| temp1634592138 wrote:
| 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.
| epistasis wrote:
| 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 team.
|
| It doesn't take amazing software in this field to do way way
| better than everybody else, apparently.
|
| With the amount of data entry that happens on the web, rhe lack
| of best practices, or really any standardized practices at all,
| is a damn shame.
| mikysco wrote:
| 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.
| ttymck wrote:
| $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.
| dhruvkar wrote:
| We're at $11M on 35 employees slinging physical stone slabs.
|
| I'd expect a software company to be much higher on
| $rev/employee.
| xmprt wrote:
| Wouldn't hardware revenue be much higher than software
| revenue because costs are equally high?
| genmud wrote:
| 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.
| namdnay wrote:
| 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
| pc86 wrote:
| For some of the devs, sure, but no way is their average
| payroll per employee $200k. How many analysts and support
| staff work there? I'm sure there are people at Expensify
| making $30-50k/yr.
| pbreit wrote:
| Slow growth over 13 years in an easy-to-monetize category can
| get you there.
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