Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Expensify CEO David Barrett (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: I just talked to an entrepreneur in Romania. 30% of his business is tying in with another e-commerce platform called Wix. I can tell you that if you talk to that guy, he’s going to give you a completely different point of view than the one that you are pushing which is people shouldn’t depend on Wix or partners.

If you’re getting 30% of your business through Wix, why wouldn’t you leverage that? This is a strategy. If you test a strategy and it works, go with it. What’s wrong with that?

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Expensify CEO David Barrett (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: From a strategic planning point of view, you have to look at where you are, where your market is, where the competition is, and figure out the priorities and market drivers. It’s true that everything works and everything doesn’t; but you have to make choices and decisions, and those other factors drive decision making.

David Barrett: If you are advising a brand new entrepreneur, what would you suggest? You can’t start an ecosystem from day one. You said that around the $100 million mark is where an ecosystem starts to make friends. 

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Expensify CEO David Barrett (Part 5)

David Barrett: When it comes to the platforms, I’d be curious to see if a major value of one the platforms is reaching existing customers. One of the major ways of starting a new business is to reach new customers that are currently underserved.

Can you use the Salesforce platform to go after a market that is one tenth of the price point? It feels like they wouldn’t be in that environment and they couldn’t afford that platform.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Expensify CEO David Barrett (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I work with formation-stage companies all the time. Two guys or one person and an outsourced team of developers build these formation stage companies where they would want to spend their resources. The best place to spend your resources is what is differentiated.

Going in and competing against AWS is not a differentiated strategy if you are trying to build a B2B SaaS company in a mixed domain of, let’s say, supply chain logistics. It’s better to have to strike out the other layers and focus your attention on building the logic that is going to give you the differentiated advantage on that layer. 

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Expensify CEO David Barrett (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let me address the points that you have made. The first point is that one of the most successful ecosystems where 30% of the apps revenue has gone to the company and has immensely added to the company’s success is Apple. It’s a platform ecosystem. 

David Barrett: I completely agree with you if you can monopolize a platform. That’s a very different world where you are a monopoly of a closed ecosystem. 

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Expensify CEO David Barrett (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What has changed in the market in the last six years? What are the big trends that are affecting your business?

David Barrett: I would say the collapse of the conference industry. For a while, there were accounting conferences where everyone would show up and pitch, but all that fell apart.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Expensify CEO David Barrett (Part 1)

I first interviewed Dave in 2014. I suggest you read that interview first before reading this one.

This discussion is a terrific back and forth on a wide-ranging set of topics, including FinTech.

Very, very interesting!

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Procurify CEO Aman Mann (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I actually know quite a bit about this space. Just yesterday, I was talking to Coupa. They have seen great adoption in the enterprise space. Could you throw some light on the level of adoption of procurement software in the midmarket?

Aman Mann: It’s accelerating because of the idea of getting to distributed teams now. You see the trend to remote and how we think about improvement in systems.