Expensify.com Reviews

Hello REDACTED, I'm sorry to have disappointed you, and I regret saying (or even suggesting) anything that maligns any past employee. I'm not sure what you're referring to, but if I were to guess, it's probably a result of struggling to explain some of the non-obvious decisions made by past employees who are no longer here. One of the greatest challenges as a CEO is allowing people to make mistakes, such that they can learn from them. Unfortunately when the person leaves before the consequences of the mistake are fully apparent, they don't get the benefit of learning the lesson, while the rest of the company is left to clean up the mess. This can be frustrating for all involved, and I could imagine that creating an environment where it's hard to "save face" for the former employee. However, thank you for the feedback, and I'll aim to do a better job here not just for myself, but for the rest of the team. As for the comment about a lack of feedback, that one I have a hard time understanding. Between weekly 1:1's, bi-annual 360 reviews, and an increasingly refined PIP (Performance Improvement Plan) process, I actually feel we do pretty well on providing feedback. Furthermore, nobody is ever singled out to be given harder work. Rather, as the scale of the company increases, so too does the burden on each of us. We all see our jobs get more difficult over time, but we don't all respond to that challenge equally. Finally, as for the Silicon Valley cliches, that's a tough one. We do have a lot of the standard accoutrements, as you mention. But the difference is we pay for it with revenue, not investor capital. So when we throw a party, take the company overseas, build out a nice office, or do whatever it is that we want to do -- we do it because it's what we want, not because we're attempting to live up to a stereotype. And if that does sometimes overlap, then so be it. Because in the ways that matter, I'm confident we are as different from a stereotypical Silicon Valley company as you can be.

Hey _____, long time no talk! I assume you’re referring to this paragraph of my recent “Expensify’s Firing Strategy” blog post: “When we had hired our 100th person into Expensify, over 60 were still working at the company. That means up to that point, 40 people had either quit or been fired. (And of those who quit, nearly all did so when they found their peers increasingly unwilling to tolerate to their disruptive attitudes, and thus less fun to work with — misery loves company, and if your peers aren’t as miserable as you, you leave to find others who are.)” However, I think you should be focused on the very next paragraph: “At the start, the terminations were pretty messy. We didn’t have a good sense of what was our fault, their fault, how to anticipate and avoid problems coming down the pipeline, or how to deal effectively with problems when they appeared. There were many dark days.” You were one of those 40 -- and an early one, at that. I call them the “dark days”, but it’s interesting you describe it as “At the time, the culture was decent.” The culture wasn’t decent -- it was toxic. Yes, we had engineers whose “technical acumen ... was beyond reproach”, and it’s amazing how far that can get you. But when you keep the technical excellence while removing the toxicity, the difference is night and day. I’d also point you back to the very first first paragraph of that post: “Nobody likes to talk about firing. It’s not something to celebrate: if you need to fire someone it means you screwed up. Either you hired the wrong person, or — more common — you hired the right person, but failed to enable their success. Either way, the blame falls on the company (not the individual), so it’s no surprise that companies tend to avoid talking about their failures.” Accordingly, the correct answer to your question of “Either … they completely biffed the hiring process and failed to manage performance effectively, or it's a case of sour grapes" is the former. There was definitely a reality where you could have succeeded at Expensify, and we didn’t give you an environment where you could thrive -- that’s on us. But regardless of how you paint it, the solution to that toxic environment was for the people creating it to quit or be fired. And as painful a process as that is, I wouldn’t choose the alternative. As for whether a “Grand Exit is in the cards”, it’s true it doesn’t happen overnight, and it’s looking increasingly like it’ll happen through IPO rather than acquisition simply because the number of potential acquirers decreases as we grow. But that exit-focused attitude was one of the contributors to that toxic environment, and I’m much more excited to have a team focused on the path than the destination. Regardless, I hope your current gig works out, and good luck to you! PS: The “free lunch” perk is a strange detail to highlight, but you’ll be happy to know it was reinstated shortly thereafter. Given the choice between temporarily cutting that perk to get profitable, or raising more cash to fuel burn, we opted for the former.