David Barrett
Founder & CEO, Expensify. On 4 shows, 7 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveengineer@dbarrett ↗LinkedIn ↗expensify.com ↗
David Barrett is the founder and CEO of Expensify, a cloud-based expense management platform launched in 2008 that went public on the Nasdaq in 2021. Before creating Expensify, he led engineering at peer-to-peer file-sharing company Red Swoosh, which was acquired by Akamai Technologies in 2007.
4shows
7appearances
112statements
8resolved
5supported
1contradicted
63%fully supported
14said about them ↓ Everything David Barrett said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Barrett: Silicon Valley overwhelmingly operates on selling to a bigger sucker
“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…”
Barrett: High startup valuations are bullshit caused by excess stimulus money
“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 …”
Barrett: High-Funded SaaS Startups Rely on Burning Cash, Not Acquisition Innovations
“Most of the companies rating it as shit tons of money, they, they're not using, like, novel customer acquisition techniques that couldn't have worked 20 years ago. They're just willing to lose more money on it. And then the VCs are willing to allow them to los…”
Barrett: Raising a gigantic VC war chest ruins company culture
“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.”
Barrett: Most VC Income Comes from Management Fees, Not Carry
“Like, the vast majority of a VCs, of a typical VCs income, will not come from their carry. It'll come from their management fees or some slice of that over the course of their career. They don't give a shit about the outcome or the success of your business by …”
Barrett: Hiring outside VC executives caps internal talent and drives them away
“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…”
Barrett: In startup funding rounds, VCs always win and employees rarely win
“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.”
Barrett: Avoid venture capitalists as long as possible
“I would avoid the VCs as long as possible, because they're the devil. Now, don't get me wrong, sometimes you need to do a deal with the devil, but you're probably gonna get fucked in the process.”
David Barrett equates celebrating venture capital funding to celebrating bank loans
“Like, to celebrate raising money is to celebrate that you took out a loan.”
Barrett: Top Companies Win via Word-of-Mouth, Which VCs Ignore
“With the exception that no business you cared about was ever built that way. Like every business, every, all the top names in the industry are built through word of mouth. And, but no one talks about that because it's not possible to be funded with capital. An…”
David Barrett says enterprise software sucks compared to mid-market opportunities
“Enterprise sucks, man. It's just like, it's super slow sales cycles. The margins are terrible. It's super competitive. It's whatever. The real opportunity is mid-market and below.”
Barrett: VCs make money deploying capital, not on exits
“But the VC business model is they get paid when they invest. And so it actually, they don't really make money on the exit. Like, there's the carry, they would say, at the very end.”
Barrett: Hiring outside executives tells top internal talent to leave
“The second that you hire in, you know, sort of that, that, that pro who comes in above everyone else, you've just told everyone else in your company, fuck you. There's no way you can ever grow in this company. Because we have just hired someone above you whose…”
Barrett: A predatory executive class exploits startups with false credentials
“There's a whole class of people out there preying upon startups that will just come in with amazing credentials and a willingness to obliterate whatever's in their way and because it's not their company in the first place.”
Barrett: Silicon Valley mostly builds startups to flip and destroy them
“Silicon Valley, more often than not, and I would say vastly more often than not, is building something that gets flipped and destroyed.”
Barrett: Silicon Valley VCs act like gamblers, not real investors
“The difference is Silicon Valley investors aren't investors. They're gamblers. They're just throwing money at crazy ideas.”
Barrett: Founders must follow a playbook for single-company success, not VC portfolios
“And I think that as an entrepreneur, we don't have a portfolio. We have one company. We need to make it work, and so I think we need to follow a playbook For how to make your company succeed, not how to make your VC's portfolio succeed.”
Barrett: Top Talent Doesn't Care Which VC Backs Your Startup
“I think that the best people out there just don't give a damn about your VC. They're probably not reading Hacker News. They probably don't care about TechCrunch.”
Barrett: High Headcount Growth Signals Inability to Solve Problems Scalably
“Hiring is a solution to a problem. The more hiring you do means the bigger problems you have. And so it means you couldn't solve them in a more creative and scalable way.”
Barrett claims Travis Kalanick has an incredibly strong moral compass
“Travis has a complicated story, and I think he's sort of developed kind of this legend around him, which is perhaps surprising to the people who know him, because he's actually a really nice guy with, I would say, one of the most strong moral compasses I know,…”
Barrett: User counts and conversion rates are vanity metrics compared to revenue
“Cause I would say like, I think about month, like revenue, obviously in month and month annual growth, but I would say all, everything else is just a vanity metric. Number of users you have, number of customers you have conversion numbers, all those kinds, lik…”
Barrett: Relying only on quantifiable decisions leads to startup failure
“I think the most important decisions are generally not quantified. We're not quantifiable. And so I'd say if you're running your business because you can prove with numbers that your decisions are good, you're going to fail because I mean, someone else out the…”
Barrett: Expensify Pays Zero Sales Commissions to Its Team
“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 other half of the tape: David Barrett's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 14 times in 9 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Nathan Latka 10Harry Stebbings 3Kip McDaniel 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Top Founders 10
20VC 3
Capital Allocators 1
2021 1 mention in 1 episode
2019 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2018 5 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
2017 5 mentions in 4 episodes 1 per episode
- 656: How to Win VR Gaming Space, $500k Raised, Team of 12, First Release This Year with CEO Peter Kortenhoeven
- 20VC: Why VCs Fundamentally Assess Founders The Wrong Way, Why VC Needs To Innovate On The Scouting Model & Why SAFE's and Convertible Notes Are The Future Of Investing with Elizabeth Yin, Founder & General Partner @ Hustle Fund
- Kip McDaniel – CIO Whisperer (Capital Allocators, EP.20)
- 654: $100k at Age 19, Now $1.2 Million From 16 Best Selling Books and New Smart Business App, Brin with CEO Dale Beaumont
- every mention in 2017, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens David's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Expensify | 3 | 57 | 83% 5/6 | full record on Top Founders → |
 SAASTRLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Expensify | 2 | 27 | — | full record on the Official SaaStr Podcast → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Expensify | 1 | 16 | 0% 0/2 | full record on 20VC → |
| CAPITAL ALLOCATORSLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Expensify | 1 | 12 | — | full record on Capital Allocators → |