categories
HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
- The Startup Velocity Question
- Platform as a Service
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
expense reports
Bootstrapping to Inc. 500: Tallie CEO Chris Farrell (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: In 2008, Concur was already public and quite a successful company. What did you think of the opportunity? Let’s get a bit granular because we do cover Concur very extensively. Recently, we did a story on Expensify as well. The expense reporting space has shown up on our blog from many different angles. So
Bootstrapping to Inc. 500: Tallie CEO Chris Farrell (Part 1)
Chris and his co-founder bootstrapped Tallie to a high growth Inc. 500 company in four years. After that, the product had to be re-architected, and slowed down for a couple of years, before picking up again. Read how they have competed in a crowded marketplace and built a robust position. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at
Building A Profitable, Steady Growth Subscription Business: Expensify CEO David Barrett (Part 7)
Sramana Mitra: Why do you need to filter the needs? From what you described, it sounds like the system is pretty self-correcting or self-converting? David Barrett: It is. Most of our time is spent minimizing the number of times that you will need to reach out to us. For example, it’s possible that we can
Building A Profitable, Steady Growth Subscription Business: Expensify CEO David Barrett (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: At that point, you said you were charging subscriptions. Was anyone paying for subscription? David Barrett: That’s interesting as well. At that time, we weren’t charging. In fact, we didn’t intend to charge for a long time. We raised our million dollars, did our pivot and were doing expense reports. This business was going to
Building A Profitable, Steady Growth Subscription Business: Expensify CEO David Barrett (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: What kind of customers did you gain traction with? David Barrett: We did a couple of things. Most of the important things we did were, frankly, just by accident. I would say that the genius of Expensify is not that we have some great insight into the market, rather we knew we didn’t
Building A Profitable, Steady Growth Subscription Business: Expensify CEO David Barrett (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: Who was your co-founder? How did you know him? Why him? David Barrett: His name is Witold Stankiewicz. He was my first hire at Red Swoosh. After I got fired, within a couple of weeks, everyone else quit. I was what was really holding that team at Akamai. They brought in some other
Building A Profitable, Steady Growth Subscription Business: Expensify CEO David Barrett (Part 3)
David Barrett: Since they thought they were approving something else, they went along with it. In the first year of getting through that barrier, there were many false starts. It was a very depressing and difficult time. The most important piece of advice I would give anybody while going through this difficult time where you’re trying to
Building A Profitable, Steady Growth Subscription Business: Expensify CEO David Barrett (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: You joined that company in what capacity? David Barrett: Titles in startups are pretty meaningless, but I was the technology guy. I guess you could call me Head of Engineering or CTO. Travis wasn’t the programmer. I started off doing everything, and then I hired a team under me to help me out. Sramana
