Expensify's David Barrett: “Any good idea has to sound bad”

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 21 February 2020

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on David Barrett, founder of Expensify, to talk about competing for talent with unicorns (2:00), the odd reason for the company’s founding (5:15), creating a fictional expense-reporting startup (6:20), the deification of serial founders (10:30), why he promotes from within (14:15), the expenses industry (16:20),why he takes the whole company overseas every year (18:30), why he doesn’t like venture capitalists (25:40), buying out his investors (28:30), the stages of development (30:45), using a subscription model (32:00), why it took 12 years to get where they are (36:30), whether he wants to go public (38:15), the homelessness problem (41:30), the great rewards/points scam (43:45), his worst day of work (49:30), and the time when his employees got dengue fever (54:30).

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	That's the hardest thing about being an entrepreneur I've found is just disregarding bad advice
0:05.3	because there's so much of it.
0:07.4	The advice that we're told in Silicon Valley is very good at making money for VCs and that's
0:12.5	why it's told.
0:13.4	Yo, technology.
0:16.2	What is it all about?
0:26.2	Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley, your weekly dispatch from behind the scenes and inside the minds of the top people in tech.
0:28.9	Thank you for tuning in.
0:30.4	We have a fabulous show for you this week.
0:32.5	David Barrett is on the program.
0:35.5	Now, David is the founder of Expensify, and chances are you have not heard of Expensify.
0:41.7	It processes expenses, which sounds super boring.
0:46.0	But think about it another way.
0:47.3	Expensify is the unicorn that you have never heard of.
0:51.9	Barrett's previous company was Red Swish, which was co-founded by another guy you
0:55.9	may have heard of, Travis Kalanick. And Barrett just has a really interesting story to tell. So
1:01.3	Expensified Process is something like $20 billion worth of expenses now. And Barrett runs it in a
1:07.3	very particular type of way. The company is super spread out. He's actually based in
1:12.0	Portland, Oregon, but he was down in San Francisco for the day, which allowed us to sit down.
1:17.3	And he just has a different type of management style. For a month, every year, he takes the whole
1:22.6	company with families to some exotic place where they all just hang out and work in another country,
1:28.7	which is something I've never heard of.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Will Morley, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Will Morley and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.