The Ledger, every show

“And in fact, the better the idea is, the worse it looks on the surface. And I think that's where it manifests itself in the board dynamic, is when you believe in something, when you truly believe in the best of possible ideas, you should expect the biggest pus…”

“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.”

“I just don't think the best advice gets bought. I think that if you're not an investor, you don't get shares.”

“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.”

“Everyone wants a good idea, but the challenge of good ideas is they have to look terrible. Like, if it didn't look terrible, it wouldn't be a good idea. It would just be the thing that everyone does. And so a good idea is something that no one else is doing.”

“Business is not nearly as hard as people make it out to be. I think most of the complexity that people experience is sort of invented complexity. It's a bunch of jargon for people to sort of justify their roles”

“I think work hard in secrets because it keeps your failures private, and they're hard enough in private, but they're really hard when they're public. And so just work hard. Don't say anything to anyone until you are such a success that you just can't hide it a…”

“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”

“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.”

“Predictability is not nearly as important as people make it out to seem, because, like, predictability is always good until suddenly something changes and it's no longer predictable. You're fooling yourself if you think you know the future. I think it's much b…”

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

“Honestly I suspect Facebook's number is bullshit anyway.”

“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.”

“And that raises everything from like Uber, Yahoo Atlassian, a bunch of public companies like Evernotes, most of Silicon Valley, most of the unicorns or former unicorns all use Expensify.”

“So then revenue churn is also complicated because we have negative revenue churn. Every customer, like every cohort pays us more today than they ever have.”

“90% of our revenue is on a credit card, which means that the only way we get paid is after you've already fully deployed your entire company.”

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

“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.”

“Employees are naturally sort of aligned, ah, to your vision. But also, they don't really have the same downside as yours. Like, they're not, their emotions aren't as tied in the company as yours aren't. If they, if you lose, you know, if you fail, To you, ah, …”

“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 more successful you are in having a strong dialogue with your investor, the less necessary it is to have frequent board meetings. If, on the other hand, you haven't really established that rapport, then maybe actually more frequent could be helpful.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The clients that we like to work with, and it's, I'd say it's 90% of the time, it's not price at all. I'd say that, you know, the sophisticated and appropriate users of search, they will pick a firm, and then they'll negotiate the price.”

“Well, I think the first thing is, because 75% of this is cultural fit.”

“The most successful CIOs are leveraging their investment committees.”

“They know as much about the, in many cases, they'll, they'll have, especially in terms of unique insights, potentially into the, how that person thinks as an investor, which is the hardest thing for us to really calibrate.”

“Well, a successful search, you get all those other constituencies, you get all their input up front, so they feel included. And then you have a really tight search committee of three, maybe four people, and they tightly control the process.”

“So, I think you take your, really your first breath on the, and the calibration point, maybe at three years, but it's, I think, five years for me is the proof of the pudding.”

“The length of time to complete searches has not shortened. Because it is a people business, it is, it's based on personal relationships, meeting people in person, building trust, establishing credibility, both with the search firm and the candidate, and then t…”

“The reason you've seen so much So many changing seats over the last several years is that because of the increased transparency around performance, and then the, so then they get the relative comparisons where, you know, through, you know, the press has turned…”

“80% of the time, the search committee will say, we want to, like, broad brush. We want to see everybody in all the different buckets. You get down to the finish line, oh, we got a sitting CIO who's going to, done this for five years, proven track record, and I…”

“So I would say the business itself is breakeven, but we are always raising and spending on big experiments.”

“Yeah, it's about 10% of our 4.5 million is a paying business user.”

“Literally, initially, we didn't charge, or the number one barrier to adoption was that we didn't charge. Because, like, we would think back, you know, years, we'd raise money, we're just a couple of people, we don't spend money on anything, everything just gro…”

“I would say like 99% of our traffic is people searching for us.”

“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…”