Expensify

“We believe that we monetize 20 times better Then other spend management systems, systems like Expensify or Concur, because we monetize through financial services.”

“And Expensify is a cash positive business. We're very proud of it. We've had growth and profitability for something like five years now.”

“What people say they want, what they say is indispensable, and what they tell you about how they'll use a product is just phenomenally different from how they actually end up using the product, and from their willingness to try something versus, you know, prop…”

“As we grew customers on the platform, there, so the number of active users on the platform grew, which was amazing, because that's how our revenue grew, but for every dollar of revenue that we brought in, we had to spend almost a proportional amount in support…”

“A huge percentage of what customers are asking actually is very simple. Or mid-level simple. It's not super complex. So, all of it went to the lower tiers, and what remained went to the higher tier, but since we were already staffed up there for the, for all o…”

“What we learned is, in fact, outbound calling didn't quite work for us from an economical perspective, even if we did it offshore, so we sunset that team, and we learned that onboarding specialists We're very, very encouraging in terms of their ability to conv…”

“If you're experimenting with ideas, if you're not quite sure about a strategy but you'd like to try it, so long as the role itself lends itself to outsourcing, consider outsourcing before you really commit and hiring a full-time team. Because once you hire a f…”

“In three months, we built a competitor to Amex. Six months after that, we built a competitor to expensify, you know, both publicly traded companies.”

“When you look at, you know, bill.com, right, they're a publicly traded company, Expensify Public and Traded or Concur or Coupa. These are all like large players that are actually very motivating and largely de-risk some of the business decisions you're making.”

“When Brex and Ramp and Expensify and Divi, all of them are worth billions, it changed. Not only did it change the size of outcomes, but it changed the way we invested. We didn't have to decide who was number one.”

“I just think it's all bullshit. Like, I think the reason the valuations are high is because there's a shit ton of money in the markets, and it has no place to go. Like, there's, we just printed, what, three and a half trillion dollars of stimulus money out of …”

“There's like, build a viable business which you care about things like profit margin, things like this, or you just sell to a bigger sucker. Overwhelmingly, Silicon Valley is based upon the latter of those, and like, the reality is at no point relevant in actu…”

“This whole idea of getting a gigantic war chest, I think that's bullshit. Like, I think that it's just a big waste of money and capital, and it just, like, ruins your company's culture.”

“This, like, the seed and A are primarily just about, like, you and the story you tell. Like, especially the seed. A, it's like you have to have some evidence that, like, you know, the story has some anecdotal evidence of some kind of traction. And then, like, …”

“How many of those same people just brought in some kind of outside executive from their VCs? Yeah, you just fucked your entire company. Because by doing that, you just indicated to every one of your employees, you cannot grow here. That we value skills that yo…”

“Again and again, every single big round we have, the employees get fucked. And there's a whole bunch of reasons for that. It's like the VCs always win. The founders sometimes win. The employees rarely win.”

“We make money just like the banks would. And then we give you the software that Expensify and others are giving you. So we really combine it into one platform.”

“When Facebook launched, they knew they had to get seven friends to a new user in the first week for you to be sticky, right? And then you're going to stick, Expensify, right? A B to B SaaS company. They know when an employee downloads their app, they've got to…”

“It was as a Trojan horse to get permission from the banks to launch an entirely different product. And then after we launched this product, everyone's like, yeah, your prepaid debit cards are cool and all, but your expense reports are amazing. And up until tha…”

“Cause if you're gonna differentiate, you can't differentiate through functionality alone. It has to be through acquisition, through business model.”

“I would say like, so we think about 45,000 paying companies. So basically... So we've got more More companies is expensified than the next four expense reporting companies.”

“Yeah, we're still under a hundred. That's right.”

“Yeah, actually that number is maybe a little bit off. It's more like maybe a 110 right now.”

“Yeah, we're profitable. So we just, we don't, we're off that, that whole bandwagon.”

“No, we have no advertising going on whatsoever right now. It's all a hundred percent word of mouth.”

“There's no commission sales component. So no one's paid a commission at all, but we certainly have a support team that stands by because it's activity based pricing.”

“The only reason We slowed down at all. It was because we got distracted by the enterprise.”

“We think that the path to growth is not so much by increasing sort of how much you extract from each customer, but just getting more customers. And so I, I'm much more focused on just massive scale than I am on trying to like, you know, squeeze harder.”

“It is just a brutal, awful slog in the start, and so as much of this conference is about getting to that hundred million, really, I mean, the hard part is getting to that, that one million. Like, that is the valley of death that basically will wipe out probabl…”

“Actually I have no independents on my board, because I don't like wild cards.”

“The part of the board, like the purpose is not to actually collectively run the company, but it is to serve a check on your power.”

“The greatest companies don't happen because suddenly, miraculously, everyone in the boardroom always agreed on every single decision. That's never happened. The way it happens, great decisions are always controversial.”

“If I wouldn't pick one person, I'd pick 50 people, and I'd call them all the time and I wouldn't, and I would consolidate their knowledge, and then I would present that consolidated answer to my actual board, people that have, like, some influence over me.”

“We're a hundred percent inbound it's we don't do any advertising, we do no outbound calling whatsoever and it's all just organic from the bottom up, and it works amazing.”

“We take our whole company overseas for a month every year. We just got back from Uruguay. And so we brought, like, a 130 people to Uruguay.”

“The expense reporting was entirely a ruse as a Trojan horse to build a product that just gave me the technology that I wanted for a completely different application.”

“This past year we put in a cap. We said this year, we're only going to hire 12 people.”

“That's why we don't do any advertising. We don't do any outbound calling. It's a hundred percent inbound. We don't have any commission sales”

“We have more customers than Concur, and we're the fastest growing in our space”

“I think like most great businesses, you sort of fall into something that everyone else has overlooked because if it weren't overlooked, it wouldn't be a great business. It would just be the thing that everyone else does.”

“We brought the very first mobile app to expense reports.”

“And so I actually had no intention of building the expense reporting system. It was just my Trojan horse To let me build this card so I could give money to the homeless safely.”

“No, no, we haven't raised, we don't intend to raise anymore, I would say we're, you know, profitable, we're growing, and so we just.”

“About a 120, I think.”

“We have 42,000 customers, whatever, but that ranges everything from like fortune 500 on down.”

“So we've got about five million users total and then some subset of those pay for 40,000.”

“We don't really share that, but I would say we're still under a hundred.”

“So we're doing just under a hundred percent year on year still, which gets tough at the scale, but the nice thing is actually we've in this past year, we've actually made a bunch of product changes that have caused growth to sort of re-accelerate”

“Most companies, the vast majority of revenue is on nine dollars per active user. And that's it. And there's no integration fees. There's no upgrade fees. There's no any of that.”

“The important one is revenue retention and we're way over a hundred percent revenue retention. And so I'd say like every every year customers pay us more on aggregate than they did the year before. And so every cohort we've ever acquired pays us more today tha…”

“After three years, they pay us about 500% more.”

“Routing around the decision maker has been our entire business model and is why we succeed.”

“We've built in a tremendous technology stack. That's much more like Twitter or Facebook than it is like concur or something else.”

“Nothing. We don't have any paid channels.”

“Everyone else cares about the conferences for lead generation, and we don't, and so we can show up big, much bigger than anyone else, because the ROI of the lead's just not our goal. We're just viewing it, we're viewing the value of the conference very differe…”

“It's only a hundred people. It's invite only, and it's in Bora Bora, all expenses paid by us. And so it's basically, it's more like the Davos of accounting, if you will.”

“So it's like, yeah, we spend millions of dollars in conferences. Could we spend twice as much? There just aren't twice as many conferences to go to. We go to every conference. We go as big as we possibly can and that's it.”

“No.”

“So literally it was expensify the corporate card for the masses, just as a proof of concept for this prepaid technology I wanted to build. And the banks sort of like authorize this stuff. And so that's how I get pulled into this space was really as a Trojan ho…”

“About a third of the company will actually submit an expense report on a given month. But it'll be a different third every month.”