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.
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."
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 hollow carcass of its former self. Avoid.
NOTE: the shady billing practices are traditionally the precursor to an S1 filing. Usually, a company going public has earnout/incentives, so they will do whatever it takes to increase revenue preIPO, even if that directly impairs the company's long term future.
> 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.
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.
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.
I tried building an AI/OCR style receipt digitisation system into my SaaS (https://usebx.com). Let me tell you, it was not easy at all. So much so, that I doubt the problem can be solved efficiently at scale without using humans. In the end, we even considered using Amazon mechanical turk, but it just wasn't worth the hassle.
At the time, I was also amazed beyond words at what Expensify and similar companies claimed to have achieved with their "AI". I find it somewhat comforting to know that they lied and it was mostly manual!
So often I find these 'AI' systems are just smoke and mirrors. You have a great system, nobody is interested. Sprinkle on some 'ai' magic beans, and people are now throwing money at you.
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.
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.
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 - this no different." I wasn't around when the mechanical turk stuff made the news, but it seems like it caught him totally off guard that people would be upset.
I suspect that the conversation around the price increases went something like:
David: There, I just sent a 3-page-long plaintext email explaining our price updates to everyone.
Other Expensifier: Shouldn't we notify people who have opted out of those emails?
David: If they opted out of announcement emails, they don't want announcment emails. Seems straightforward to me.
Other Expensifier: Yeah, but, like, we don't have multiple opt-out channels. They can either get every multi-page plaintext missive you send, or they can opt out and miss significant price increases.
David: Nope. They made their choice, we should respect it. Multiple opt-out channels are an antipattern. Anyway, the number of users who will be upset about this are vanishingly small - let's worry about the rest.
Not sure about that, I interviewed with Expensify 10 years ago when they had about 2-3 employees. At the time, David clearly had no idea what he was talking about when it came to code. Remember when he posted that inflammatory blog post about not hiring .NET developers? David was super rude to me.
10 years ago woulda been 2011ish? I dunno, he was pretty deeply technical at the time. He had a pretty solid background in distributed systems.
I mean, yeah, he certainly had some terrible opinions about code - that .NET one included. He was also pretty anit-automated-testing, which drove me nuts. But just because he had some bad opinions doesn't mean he wasn't a serious technologist. Perhaps a good coder, but a bad software engineer?
Hah - the idea of changes to your contractual billing rate being classified as marketing emails... one really does see something new everyday in tech...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not sure the CEO would label it as MVP. I remember pretty well that it was portrayed as cutting edge and robust technology (hence the name Bedrock). But I do agree with you that it exposes you to some interesting areas.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think this is Concur - I'm pretty sure this is your accounting team. Frequently the software change coincides with an outsourcing effort, so they're not being paid to be helpful, they're being paid to apply the policy as written.
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…
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.
* 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."
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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....
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.
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.
$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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
> Following that those receiving the message can decide to continue to support the business or not.
Actually, they could not - this is the crux of the issue. They didn't just send emails to their customers, but to their customer's employees. As an employee, I do not get to pick whether I use Expensify or not. My employer does.
Imagine your company decides to use MS services for email (e.g. Outlook Exchange). Is it OK for you to have to receive Satya's views on politics and not have a choice not to receive them (other than quitting your job)?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Where I was working at the time had no employees in the USA but yet we all got this email telling us how to vote in the upcoming USA election. Given none of us had the right to vote in the USA elections we found this email to be very strange.
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.
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.
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.
I don't care if a CEO spends their own money on PAC donations - but sending a mass email to all your customers (including international ones) about an election is just bizzare.
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.
Original comment: CEO was bad because he emailed people saying Trump wanted to destroy democracy.
Reply 1: And he did try to destroy democracy when he lost.
Reply 2: Well, the people he incited didn't realize they were destroying democracy.
I think this is what they call missing the forest through the trees.
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.
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.
> 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.
This is a good example of "I cannot understand why you do X, therefore I'm sure the reason is Y."
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.
> 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.
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.