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).<p>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.<p>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.
I still marvel that they've built such a big company around a SQLite fork.<p>>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.
When my startup was acquired, we had to migrate from using Expensify to some god-awful corporate nonsense (SAP Concur).<p>Lord, how I miss Expensify. It was the epitome of intuitive.<p>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.
Two interesting things I noticed:<p>* 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.<p>* 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."
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.<p>It doesn't take amazing software in this field to do way way better than everybody else, apparently.<p>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.
> 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.<p>For 88 million in Revenue (FY2020)... you can buy the stock and have no say at all in how the company is run....
$50M in revenue on 130 employees seems quite remarkable, no? Not to mention they grew to $88M with the same headcount.<p>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.
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.<p>Granted, Expensify grew 60% over the last twelve months, but by their own account it was <i>'primarily due to a pricing change implemented in May 2020, which led to a gradual increase in per member price for our paid members"</i><p>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?
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.
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.<p>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.<p>I will never give this company a single cent after that stunt.