15 ms·

Expensify S-1

119 points by mattmarcus 5y ago

htrp 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    I hate this, but us purchasers have no one but ourselves to blame.
    - dublinben 5y ago
      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-exclusion/ https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2018/08/22/dual-class-index-...
- nabla9 5y ago
  Seven or more years out from their IPOs, firms with perpetual dual-class stock trade at a significant discount to those with sunset provisions (using median relative valuation) 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-case-against-corporate-royalty https://www.sec.gov/news/speech/perpetual-dual-class-stock-c...
nattaylor 5y ago
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 5y ago
  > 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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
ttymck 5y ago
$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.
- namdnay 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
  - ttymck 5y ago
    The current number is $88M. For comparison: Gitlab did $150M on 1,400 employees.
    - missedthecue 5y ago
      And sure enough, GitLab doesn't even make an operating profit.
- pbreit 5y ago
  Slow growth over 13 years in an easy-to-monetize category can get you there.
- dhruvkar 5y ago
  We're at $11M on 35 employees slinging physical stone slabs. I'd expect a software company to be much higher on $rev/employee.
bgorman 5y ago
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.
- twostorytower 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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?
MisradHaOtzer 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
  - Woofles 5y ago
    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.
zht 5y ago
I still remember when "reimburse me in bitcoin" was an option in the early days. Quite the interesting company
- nemo44x 5y ago
  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!
bmiller2 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    we use Concur (1500+ employees). not my cup of tea but the accounting people love it.
    - brianwawok 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        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.
        5y ago
bastardoperator 5y ago
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.
tomlor 5y ago
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.
- kyleee 5y ago
  Hah - the idea of changes to your contractual billing rate being classified as marketing emails... one really does see something new everyday in tech...
- lugged 5y ago
  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.
  - 55555 5y ago
    HelpScout does this too.
- eps 5y ago
  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 5y ago
epistasis 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
- fuzzer37 5y ago
  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?
  - epistasis 5y ago
    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.
JaakkoP 5y ago
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?
- pwned1 5y ago
  Or people jumping ship because of the CEO's "muh fascism" email sent to all customers.
  - JaakkoP 5y ago
    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.
- mchusma 5y ago
  Their number of users was down considerably, listed in non-GAAP metrics. They have a reasonable claim to blame COVID, but their story is basically one of successfully increasing price.
davidw 5y ago
First Oregon IPO in quite a while, apparently.
StratusBen 5y ago
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."

119 points by mattmarcus 5y ago

htrp 5y ago

> 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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  I hate this, but us purchasers have no one but ourselves to blame.
  - dublinben 5y ago
    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-exclusion/ https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2018/08/22/dual-class-index-...
nabla9 5y ago
Seven or more years out from their IPOs, firms with perpetual dual-class stock trade at a significant discount to those with sunset provisions (using median relative valuation) 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-case-against-corporate-royalty https://www.sec.gov/news/speech/perpetual-dual-class-stock-c...

nattaylor 5y ago

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 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago

ttymck 5y ago

$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.

namdnay 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
- ttymck 5y ago
  The current number is $88M. For comparison: Gitlab did $150M on 1,400 employees.
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    And sure enough, GitLab doesn't even make an operating profit.
pbreit 5y ago
Slow growth over 13 years in an easy-to-monetize category can get you there.
dhruvkar 5y ago
We're at $11M on 35 employees slinging physical stone slabs. I'd expect a software company to be much higher on $rev/employee.

bgorman 5y ago

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.

twostorytower 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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?

MisradHaOtzer 5y ago

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 5y ago
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.
- Woofles 5y ago
  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.

zht 5y ago

I still remember when "reimburse me in bitcoin" was an option in the early days. Quite the interesting company

nemo44x 5y ago
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!

bmiller2 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  we use Concur (1500+ employees). not my cup of tea but the accounting people love it.
  - brianwawok 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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.
      - 5y ago

bastardoperator 5y ago

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.

tomlor 5y ago

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.

kyleee 5y ago
Hah - the idea of changes to your contractual billing rate being classified as marketing emails... one really does see something new everyday in tech...
lugged 5y ago
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.
- 55555 5y ago
  HelpScout does this too.
eps 5y ago
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 5y ago

epistasis 5y ago

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 5y ago
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.
fuzzer37 5y ago
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?
- epistasis 5y ago
  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.

JaakkoP 5y ago

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?

pwned1 5y ago
Or people jumping ship because of the CEO's "muh fascism" email sent to all customers.
- JaakkoP 5y ago
  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.
mchusma 5y ago
Their number of users was down considerably, listed in non-GAAP metrics. They have a reasonable claim to blame COVID, but their story is basically one of successfully increasing price.

davidw 5y ago

First Oregon IPO in quite a while, apparently.

StratusBen 5y ago

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."