Building the Next Superapp with David Barrett, CEO of Expensify

Ding a public company only affects you as much as you let it. And so our commitment is to long-term shoulder growth. I'm going after that trillion dollar number, not this number, and not in that 50% more than this number or whatever it is. We don't want incremental growth. We see an opportunity to go for something huge, and we're taking it. Hello, and welcome to a special episode of the Cloud Accounting Podcast. I'm Blake Oliver, and I'm David Leary. And we are here with David Barrett, the founder and CEO of Expensify. David, welcome to the show. What's up? This is David's first appearance, right? I've been doing this for... Really? I think so. Oh, maybe. Well, spend a while. Well, we got to see you recently at Expensicon 3, David. I don't think we properly thanked you for bringing this out here. You and the Expensify team, thank you very much for bringing this out to Italy, and showing us a great time. It was a blast. Yeah. Well, thanks so much for coming. I mean, that was pretty... It went off without a hitch, and I think it was pretty epic. It was. And the whole time, we were like terrified that it would rain, because like, did you have any backup plans? Yes. I mean, that was... There were a lot of outdoor events, and we got so fortunate that the weather was good. Oh, we live left in the edge. We need backup plans. I have to ask, because we were kind of doing like informal polls the whole time, how much did that event cost? I'm an accountant. I have to know. Enough. So, we're not... We're not going to get an answer from you on that one. Nope. All right. And my guess is, I know there are apps that are running between $500,000 to $1,000,000 a month on Facebook and Google ads, right? So they're spending, anywhere from $6 to $12,000 a year, and have nothing to show for it, kind of. Anyway. And so I'm like, even if you spent $6,000,000, the people are going to talk about this forever. And somebody mentioned to me, they're like, oh, yeah, that's one of... That's... Oh, you were expensive. And that's one of the top conferences. I'm like, it's not top conferences. It's like top-life timeline events. It's not... And you don't compare it to conferences. You compare it to major life milestones in your life. Well, I think that you're right, though, in that it's so easy to dump the non-minimal amounts of money into traditional advertising, and it's kind of like no one got fired for buying IBM. It's like no one got fired for spending money in Edwards. It's just... It's like you spend more in your VCs, you're like, fuck yeah, you know, why didn't you spend even more at an even lower ROI, or there's actually no positive ROI? It's like why didn't you actually just like lose even more money on each customer? And that's called success in a traditional sort of like VC-backed Silicon Valley world. And I think that our approach is very different. We acknowledge that like performance advertising and buying large just doesn't work. It's very hard to work at scale. And so I think the most effective marketing is by investing in relationships. And those relationships, especially in the accounting industry, because it's like even a small bookkeeping firm, is basically has the potential footprint of like an enterprise client. If you could get all their clients on board. And so we think that every accountant is an incredibly valuable release to have that is almost impossible to over-invest in. And so I think that yes, if we're making a choice between like, you know, Edwards versus Expansicon. Maybe going to Expansicon? No. In reality, we're a profitable company. We don't need to make that trade-off, so we can just do both. But I would say events like Expansicon, or maybe NRF is familiar with our San Francisco lounge as well, or basically like we open up our office to anyone who come in, any expensive fabric can come in and get basically unlimited free coffee and cocktails with an amazing view of San Francisco. And it's packed day in and day out. And the way that we view it is, it's basically like a 20, like opening a conference booth every single day. So we can either spend 10 times more than that. They have five in a conversation with someone on an Expo floor, or we can spend all day with them in our lounge and actually have like an incredible brand experience. And so I think it's about recognizing what you're actually trying to do. It's not about the specific ROI particular, you know, transaction. It's about investing in a relationship that's going to produce sort of compounding events for years and years to come. So to rewind a little bit. So I remember the first time we started we're interacting and working with you is 2008, early 2009. And at that time, I was still into it just, I don't even think I was in the developer team. It was still like working on view my paycheck and we shared a presentation or whatever it's a leader con or whatever, but that's when con concur launched concur breeze. And I remember being at that conference, you and another expensive employee and that was it at the conference. There was no booth. There was no bother. There was nothing at that. Yeah. And they rolled in with leather jackets, all the, these were like third party markers. They weren't even employees of the company. And they rolled a motorcycle in like a branded, you remember West Coast cover it. They roll all that in. And I remember you just going off on a tirade, these people are so dumb, they're just wasting money. They don't even, they don't even sending their employees to actually talk to their customers and learn about them and fine, we'll just go drink on their free booze that they have. And they're thrown at, it's just over the top of event. And then since then, you've done expense, con one, a super bowl at expense of con two, expense of con three, right? Like, what, why is it, you're, you're doing these over the top things that's just like growing in the motorcycle, but you're doing it differently. Oh, they're very different. Like, we roll in a Tesla and give it away to some, they just roll in the motorcycle and then roll it up. Like, you know, if they were given away cool breezer like leather jackets, sure, then maybe that's where it's going to cool. They just had some people wearing leather jackets who left. And so they're investing in sort of a big brand moment of just basically it's like, look at us, how cool we are. And then buy our approach is, no, we're going to invest in making your life awesome. So, so no, I think that's actually quite a big difference in the strategies there. So you also have a very different strategy with your product, a very nontraditional strategy. And at the conference, you got up on stage and the first thing you said was, if I made paraphrase, we're rebuilding, we're recreating, expensify. Like this is, we're making a brand new, expensify, it's called the new expensify. And it comes from the, I think guiding principle that you said every payment is a conversation. Yeah. Can you speak to the meaning of that when you say every payment is a conversation? What does that have to do with like expense reports and spend management? You think? Yeah, exactly. And say, I don't, I say this is the whole pitch that goes behind us. Well, I'm trying to summarize it down. It's like, if you add up all of the customers of all of our competition across the entire world, it add up to like, maybe 300,000 businesses in the world, but there's 300 million businesses in the world. There's like 27 million businesses in the United States alone. And so whatever the entire industry is doing is clearly missing the mark. Somehow over the course of like 30 years, the sum of everyone's effort has only captured 0.1% of the global opportunity. So clearly, the current business model is broken or at least only works in a tiny, tiny corner of the market. And so we're trying to say, how do you go after the other untapped 99.9% of the global opportunity? It's got to look a little different. But if you could do it, let's say that you could get 300 million businesses, like let's say you could get a billion people onto a common platform. That would be a hell of a business. That'd be like the next trillion dollar business right now. And that's like, well, we're gunning people. No one else is even trying to do that. They're just basically saying, I want to get my bite of the 0.1% and we're saying, no, we want to think all of the remainder. And so it's a very different vision. And I'd say that that vision can only be approached with a different business model. And you can say, well, what are all the other platforms that have got to a billion users? How many of them got to a billion users through an enterprise sales model? Like did someone call you up and say, hey, I think you should try Instagram Instagram is the finest. And pitch you. I don't know. It's not how it works. Like TikTok, all these others out there, the only way you get to a billion users is by satisfying a use case that happens every single day. And I would say, like, even the biggest expense reporter, they're not so much as every single day. But they are doing a lot of collaboration. And so let me sort of step back and say, well, what is an expense report at the end of the day? It's basically a very structured way to request a reimbursement. It's a structured chat system in a way because they're like, let's say you weren't using an expense reporting system, which again, almost no one does in the grand scheme of things. You'd have to just go talk to someone. You'd be like, hey, Blake, you owe me 50 bucks. And then I'd either say that out loud or I'd text it to you or email it to you or slack it to you or something like that. But that's, that is real world expenditure for it is actually a conversation. And the tools like us are just a structured conversation tool. And so if we say, well, you know, in fact, every form of payment is a conversation between two or more people. If you go up to a food truck button and say, like, hey, I want a taco. You basically say, I want a taco and I'm willing to pay this much money for you and negotiate there in real time. And that's what I kind of got done. So it facilitates that transaction in a very, sort of, clean way. But it's a conversation that's happening. And so we view it as everything in our platform, everything in the financial industry is some sort of conversation around money. And so if you strip away all of that, extent of it is a conversational chat tool, but it's built on a different kind of conversation. It's like slack, which is for unstructured product discussions and just kind of linger on forever. It's basically thinking about in terms of structured a transactional chat system where it's like, I want to talk about something specific. I want to talk about it until it's done. And then after it's done, it has a clear ending point. And then all of that is retained and categorized neatly for a later reference. It's a transactional chat system. And that's basically what we're building our entire re-building our entire product around. Because that is too much for quantum boards. It's true for invoices, real payments. It's true for a corporate travel. It's true for like, is requesting money from your company is really the same as requesting money from your roommates or like settling up to your friends. It's all money. It's all the same conversation with some nuance around that. And so our new design is about capturing inherent similarity of all payments flows across all of these into a single common tool that can do them all better than any of the specific tools could have ever done them. So this is a, when you say conversational chat, like to give a picture to our listeners, we're talking like imagine Slack and instead of just chatting about, say, an expense that you need to have, like you actually can request reimbursement, you can send money, you've connected payment rails inside of the new expenseify so that, you know, at this point, that's what we're going to be able to do is request and send money. And it goes beyond that as well. I mean, yeah, I think that Slack is a good comparison, but it's actually Slack is not that widely used. It's widely used in the sense that the enterprise has used it, but like, not 300 million businesses. And so I think if you want to talk on a billion user scale, you need to be talking about SMS, maybe a message, maybe WhatsApp. That's where we are comparison towards. Slack's actually kind of a power level tool. We think more in terms of WhatsApp is like the goal standard is the best sort of like broad set. So, new expenseify feels like WhatsApp had a love filed with Venmo, or basically, what about WeChat in China, right? Ooh, the super app. I think WeChat's an amazing comparable. And I think that one way you can think about it is we're trying to build the American WeChat. We want to be the sort of like, you know, the WeChat for the rest of the world, a super app concept, because I think they've demonstrated you don't need 500 apps to do all these specific things that are like overlapping mostly. You need one app that's able to do in 500 use cases. And so I think we're doing it. Honestly, the only competitor out there that I actually think is even trying is the same as it sounds is Elon Musk and Twitter. I mean, I don't think he's going to ask you this. Yeah, let's give that you brought it up. Yeah, because he renamed the Twitter parent company to X, which was his original vision, I think. I don't know the whole story. But PayPal, right? PayPal is like a payments super app kind of thing. Yeah. I mean, I think that's what he's been aiming for for a long time, and it's kind of pretty in traffic. And so it might be psycho, but at the same time, like it's the rockets do fly and that's pretty cool. And so I think that, but I think it's important to recognize that it's not going to be concur. Like, they're not even trying like absolutely no one in their company is trying to take over a billion users. It's just not even part of the road. Right. OK, so let's look at this cynically or just like from like, Expensify now has what, $100 million in recurring revenue or more than that, right? Like, you have something like that. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, you could just like continue to improve the existing Expensify app, you know, make marginal improvements, add some features to get bigger customers and just rake in the dough for years and years, decades, potentially, because once people get on something that works, they generally don't move off of it, right? So, you know, why not? Why create a new Expensify and put all this effort into, you know, getting that three billion users or whatever you want to get? Why not? I thought you'd increase it to three. Oh, it was more modest, only going for one, but hey, you know what? I like the mention. And maybe another way to phrase that for you answer that, Davis, the way I look at it is like, you've done a startup, you've proven it's successful, you've taken the company public. You're, you're, you're similar age as me, you know, we're getting push in the 50 somewhere next, right? Right. And 28. And it's like, to start over, like you're kind of building a brand new startup again, a new product from scratch and it's conceptually different from anything else out there. Yeah. You got it. That's exactly right. But like, what's the alternative? Like, just go fishing? What? I don't like the fish. You could do something really good fishing. I guess. But like, you know, I think that the way I view it is, and I haven't been saying this for a long time, I view it's meant to, everything we've done to date, and rather we run expense for like a pre-revenue startup. It just happens to be that this pre-revenue startup brings in like 160 million dollars and like generates a whole bunch of like positive cash and all this kind of stuff. And just because the design can't help but mint money, like it's just, that's just, this is what it that's. And I would say, but we haven't really, what we have today was never actually the vision. Kind of like Elon Musk. It's like, you know, PayPal, all sorts of stuff. It was never actually as vision. This is kind of, is you build something, you learn, you throw it away, you kind of move on sort of thing. You know, I think in engineering terms, there's this idea of if you don't know how to do something, what you do is you do it, and then you throw it away and then do it for real. And so I view that it's like, with expense of that, everything we've done to date, it's like, look, we might be the best expense reporting system out there. That's cool. But that doesn't mean the best expense reporting system that could be. It just happens to be the best one that's available right now. I think in the process of doing this, we're like, okay, okay, now I get how this works. I see how the accounting works and all the payments rails and the money transmission licensing, it's us compliance and peace, and all this are junk. It's like, okay, we got this. Like, now we know kind of how to do all the basics. Now let's do it for real. And I think that this vision is, what's interesting about New Expensify and the curious fear of thoughts on this, one of the challenges is it's so simple, it just doesn't seem real. It's basically like, we've been programmed to think that accounting has to be so difficult. It has to have so much jargon and so much complication and obviously you have to have 50 tools. You need to connect your same bank account in the same jail system. The 50 different tools can figure your employees in every one differently, you have to do so much work. And that's just what it feels like it has to be. And so when a New Expensify comes out, we're like, no, you just connect once. And then, oh, you want to get money from someone? Yeah, you could request money. The word invoice, extension port, bill, they don't appear in the product. It's just, if you want money, you request it. If you request it from your company, it's an extension port. If you request it from a client, it's an invoice. That's the account's care about that. You probably don't though. Well, and I would have said, sorry, David, but I got to ask this follow up. I would have said like, this is crazy, maybe six months ago, but we just saw the roll out of chat GPT and now it seems like everything's going to be a conversation. And you've been working on this for, I mean, that's exactly what, like, chat GPT is just a better execution upon where I would say, like concierge is basically, is our chat system. It's our AIB chat system we've been working on for years, and I think chat GPT is great in that it knows everything about nothing, basically, just kind of knows the general, like, wow, this is the general zeitgeist of the humanity, but it's not very good at anything specific, which is hilarious, like the singularity is going very different than the science fiction predicted. And it's basically like, it's good for creative stuff, but sucks with math, that's bizarre. And so I think that chat GPT is great as like general conversations, but then we have our team basically step in whenever things get like real hard. And so the combination of something like, you know, AI generative, generative AI chat systems on the front end that can escalate to humans in the back end for when things get really difficult. I think that's the dream. And that's what we've built. We've been basically looking forward to this for a long time. Because the idea of payments or a conversation is not a new idea. This was the original idea. It just took us 15 years to get to the here to actually get off on it. Yeah, I remember 15 years ago you were talking about how you wanted to destroy the ACH system. And like, is this a step to that, right, where you can move money around and maybe bypass the CCH entirely? I don't know. I think like, you know, I've probably come around to say like, ACH isn't as bad. I mean, it doesn't job. There's a reason for it. And it's got much faster. There's same day, ACH and things like this and the clawbacks of like, you know, it's complicated. I don't know if I was appreciative of that as much 15 years ago as I do right now. I think that things can be improved, but things aren't as bad as they seem or if they are bad, there's a reason behind it. So one thing I found entertaining at ExpensiveCon is you bring, you know, a hundred accountants, you know, some are CFOs of companies, some are virtual CFOs, their heads of accounting cast divisions, their accounting firms, you know, they have problems with their clients. And you show them new Expensify and a lot of them couldn't grasp it. It was almost like too much. Like you said, it's too easy or it was just, now like, I feel like Blake and I were nerds and we drink beers with you and we talk about this, like, what things could be in the future. And they were so hung up over like approvals and I'm like, but the approval is already there because you priority had a conversation that said, can I fix the oven? And Blake said, yes, like, there is no approval. But the whole concept is just exploded and like, their brains just couldn't, and it's not they couldn't handle it. It's just, there's not ready for this. It was too much. And so what was your strategy in showing this to everybody? Well, yeah, I guess I would say that is a challenge and that it's basically it's a very different way of viewing these traditional problems. And you got to start somewhere and we just don't expect everyone to get it on day one. And that's fine. Like we're not forcing anyone over to those new design or like, let's also work, we like the old stuff, keep using the old stuff, but new stuff is going to be even better. And so I think they're going to see over the course of the next year, whatever. Now, we're making the new accentify just more and more attractive, we're making it easier to adopt and we're going to show more and more, like, for example, a new accentify, you can be like, you could do expense level conversations, can't you do that in all those things? It's not, it's not designed to do it. The new one is. So if you want to like comment on specific expenses, you're going to go to the new accent ify for that. If you want to have like, you know, reaction stuff things and like a more thoughtful approach there, or like, you want to have the conversation before the expense, well, that happens a new accentify. But the old accentify is just, you know, a traditional accentify. I feel like we're going to lure people over a bit by bit. And this is going to be something where people have to experience it to really grasp it. I mean, the old accentify, the classic, classic accentify was also like, that's right, not old, yes. Expensify classic is one of those things, too, where, you know, people who had never done a digital online expense report and scanned receipts and had them magically attached to credit card transactions, they had to see it to actually experience it. And I feel like this is going to be one of those things where you're going to have a conversation about an expense. And then it's going to get auto approved because the system saw the implicit implied or explicit approval in the chat. And then the reimbursement just happens. Yeah. And I think that you guys, you get it. And I think that's, but in this is inevitable, right? Just like we all, like, you're called a cloud accounting podcast, but like, remember the cloud was terrifying for a long time. Remember how many conversations are like, is it safe? Is it secure or whatever? No, those conversations still happen, but not very much anymore. And I think it takes time for this to bake in because like, it's a very important field. It's a field that has a lot of, you know, tradition behind it. And that tradition has been refined over the course of a very long time. And so we shouldn't expect it to change and that's fine. But I think we can, but it's also, I think it's shown it's open to change. And I think that's, if you can show a better path, it's not going to happen fast, but it will happen. So you're building a startup inside of a public company now. It seems like that might be challenging because public markets do not like experimentation. They want, they want steady, predictable earnings. They want you to just do what you're good at and do it quarter after every 12 weeks. Yeah. And it seems like the market just punishes you brutally for this, you know, with the stock price. And, and like, how does that, how does that feel? I mean, you got to pay attention to it, right? Or like, what about the employees? You know, I, it must be tough. Sure. So I'd say, so the very first thing we said when going public, the IPO night, we said, okay, first moving public, we never talk about being public. And so like, I actually don't like a share price at all. We don't talk like it's one of the rules is you just don't talk about share price. You don't celebrate when it goes up. You don't lament when it goes down because we give information to the market literally four times a year. And that's it. And the market price goes changes a thousand times a second. It clearly has nothing to do with us. It's almost entirely driven by factors have nothing to do with us. And so we can't control, like if you're going to hang your hat on a bunch of like microscopic decisions that we just couldn't even involve in, like, that's the bad strategy for living. And this comes back to like, why we went public in the first place. So when the first question, the most common question we got is basically, okay, so you're going, you're profitable. You got a ton of money in your balance sheet. Like, why? Like, why are you going public? And it's just the basically create liquidity for investors because like we work for shareholders. And so it's like, we just have to, like, they can't just be private forever and give that money back somehow. And so I think that we went public in order to create liquidity, but that didn't have to change our vision of the future. Being a public company only affects you as much as you let it. And so our commitment is to long-term shoulder growth. I'm going after that trillion dollar number, not this number. And in that 50% more than this number or whatever it is, we didn't want incremental growth. We see an opportunity to go for something huge and we're taking it. But also we have to. I think that like everyone else out there who's not, they're just, they're just, they're just walking dead. They don't even know it because something, if it's not us, it's X or it's someone that's going to come along and execute this vision and it's going to wipe everyone else out. And they're just trying to like, you know, sell their shares until they can get out and they get it. That's proven Silicon Valley strategy. But we're trying to do something different. And you also did a non-traditional listing. You did a direct listing. Is that right? No, actually we ended up doing a traditional price round, but we did do it in some unusual ways. And we have a share class structure that commits employees to long-term. And so basically for our management team, over half their shares are in this locked-up sort of format, which requires 10 or even 50 months of notice before you can sell because they're trying to say, if you want to participate in the long-term decision-making of the company, we need confidence that you are focused on the long-term results of the company. And so really we're not, like, we've been very clear from, we're not optimizing for the next quarter. We're optimizing for the next decade and there's, there's very different strategies. And you also set up the voting structures such that you don't have to worry about like hostile takeover or shareholders, revolting and forcing you to do what you don't want to do, right? Yeah, but I would say we also did that in an unusual way, rather than having a traditional high-voting share structure that just makes me into a dictator. We built this model that actually is called a voting trust. The three basically, the people, the three employees of the most shares have one vote each. And so I have the most shares, but I only have one third of the voting trust. And so the consequence of all of this is we're a high-voting company, but I can be fired for only by my own employees. And so we're, it's not a dictatorship, it's more of a Senate. And I think that's because good people don't want to work for a dictatorship, they want to participate in something and have a real voice. And so we've created a company that gives our employees that voice, which is why they've stuck around for so long. I don't know if the Senate is the best analogy though, because they didn't murder Caesar. Well, you know, but he was trying to be a dictator, that's why. Allegedly, right? The eventually yes, the debate. They wrote the news, though. Yeah, the debate that will continue for thousands of years. I just finished watching that show Rome on HBO, like I'd never watched it before. Amazing. So well done. Really enjoyed it. I wish they had kept it going a little longer. I felt like they tied it up too quickly at the end, you know? Roman Empire is like thousands of years at history. Can't you just spend a little more? Yeah, you can't just stop with Octavian when he's like 25 or something, right? Like, anyway, over. I guess Pax Romano was not interesting enough. So one thing we didn't talk about yet was the, you know, coming functionality, what you're going to add to new Expansify beyond just conversational chat and expense reimbursements. There was something that you previewed at the conference called tasks or is that the right term tasks? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. How does that work? Yeah, sure. I think tasks. Again, it's one of these things that sounds so simple, that's like hard to get excited by. But I actually think it's like the most groundbreaking change. And I think it's because one, if we say all payments are conversations, but they're transactional conversations. They're conversations to achieve some specific goal that is done, which is a different kind of conversation and slack. But there are lots of other transactional conversations, which are not slack. Like for example, like, can you upload those documents? Or can you just answer this question? I'm trying to close the books for you, clients. And I need answers from you on a reliable schedule and you're not giving them to me. So today, the best practice is you email them and ignore you, you email them, maybe you text them and eventually just throw something on the calendar for a Zoom call and then you go through this giant list of questions and everyone's like, oh, and I was like waiting around like, this is a huge waste of time. And so everyone hates the current model, but it's just kind of the best that exists. Our approach is to take sort of issue management, like you must say, in the same sense that with X-Fentify, you can request money from anyone in the world. Just type in an email address or phone number, you can request money from them and then we'll sort of the accounting treatment behind the scenes. Likewise, we use that same kind of universal platform to say, you can ask anyone in the world to do anything and then we will track it in a tracked fashion. And then you can say, basically, here's the outstanding tasks, here's who's waiting on you to do this particular thing. And then basically manage not just your expensive course, but all of your basic tasks for accounting on a closed basis. And in best of all, wrap all those up to recur automatically on a monthly basis. And so you'd say, all you're recurring monthly closed questions is program them in. We will ask them from the same people every single month, we'll tell you with a Gantt chart based on we just asked them. And it's a likewise from a firm perspective, and it's about baking in the knowledge of each client into the client configuration. If a new client account needs a step into a client, they don't need to talk to the old one to figure out what's going on. It's all there. It's already in the past. But it's about trying to use recurring tasks to allow accountants to automate their firms and automate basically the recurring closing of things like this for the firms. And so yes, it's about using a platform that allows you to scale up the number of clients that each accountant can manage while also improving the consistency of that and reducing the training for each. So I think that's why I think tasks are the most interesting because going back to the question of, yeah, even like the most common business traveler, they're not submitting essentially for every single day, but they're doing something every single day. And so if you can capture the conversations and basically add structure to the non-financial aspects of their day as well, I think we can offer so much more value to our customers and we can be giving them so many more tools and doing it for nine bucks a month. And so it's basically a huge basket of functionality for the cheapest possible prices. So one of our live stream viewers said, people are scared of transitioning to new software. There are many organizations still on QB desktop because QBO implementation was a nightmare at the start and the interface is still very different. So I guess this leads to the question, even if you build new expenseify, how do you get people to switch? It's been a, how long David, how long has QuickBooks Online been around and how long? Just desktop people will be on for another 50 years and then I see expenseify classic and I'm like, oh, they got Dave has a new problem. He's going to have people who have expenseify classic for the next 25 years. Yeah. So how do you do it that it's a fair question. And so first off, when it comes to desktop, that's why we support QuickBooks at desktop. And so it's like, you know, we still have the, you know, market leading QBD support and we will for as long as people want it. And so that's cool. I think that migrating people over, yeah, it's a real challenge, but the main concern that people have the QBD to QBO is that the functionality is just not there. And so it's not like just about, I think if you show people a different and better way to accomplish their same requirements, people are willing to do it. It makes training and cajoling and time and patients know that, but they'll do it. The main problem with QBO is it's just not its feature of rich it's QBD. And so the people who are on QBD, it's actually like, I like the interface better or something like this. It's basically, it does my job and QBO doesn't. And so it's kind of, it's not quite the same thing. So I think that the main way that we do this is to make sure that new extensify is a total super set of old extensify. And for anything that's not that, that we keep that old functionality around basically as long as people need it. And so now I don't dispute that it's going to be a challenge. But I think our approach is to do a lot of people more with honey than vinegar is to say, we can offer the same exact functionality, but we can do it in a way that is so much better. And you're in control as to the timeline as to how fast you switch over. So one thing you've done differently is obviously you have what, 140 employees, like you're super, super efficient. And now you're building this new product and I step back and I'm like, oh, you've all this cash in the bank. You probably should have, he's going to have to build a team of 1000 engineers and layers of management to build this product and you're not doing it that way. Can you talk about like the systems you've built in place and how you're, because you're using the life-to-better term open source developers or the, what do you call it? I'm not the right name either, but always you kind of, yeah, you're building this with the relationship with the engineers and what processes you guys have had to create from scratch to do this. Sure. I would say so are 140 full-time employees. Their primary job is to be creative journalists. And so whether they're an engineer or on the sales side of support or like even on an accounting team. The job, first and foremost, is to automate their jobs away as to figure out basically even our accounting team. If we're doing socks compliance, we get a public customer doing socks compliance. We think what socks about socks compliance? How can we make it better? And so using our tax system for socks compliance is so much better than what the other tools everyone else uses and so forth. And so our core team is about the creative hub and a challenge is it doesn't need to be bigger. Like we're 140 people right now, we're 140 people last year, 140 people year before. We basically are hiring in our attrition to hit the replacement level if you will. Music kind of stay here. And that's fine. It's kind of like a ball stomach where basically it's just reducing and getting better and better. And this core of people we have are more and more efficient every single year. And like we look back at ourselves a year ago, we're like, we're such idiots. Why do we do it that way? This is so better. And so this same group of people is able to produce more and more just by a few better processes and who has them and all this kind of stuff. So the core creative team is a stable device. But as you've mentioned, when something can be condensed down to a project that just needs to be implemented, then you can hand it off to someone else. And that's where you actually need the massive scale. That's why new expensive is made entirely an open source and says such the it's not just to we get the random casual distributed that makes a change. But most importantly is it enables us to hire like a thousand engineers from around the world. Sorry, I need to understand this better. When you say the entire new expense wise open source, can I go like look at the code? I mean, I wouldn't know what I'm looking at, but could I do that? Yeah, it's actually it's interesting. It's it's probably known as really picked up on this, but it's I think we're like the only SaaS business that has a natural official client that's open source. Like there's lots of like Twitter has an API that and there's like other Twitter clients you can use, but the Twitter client itself is close source. I think we're the only real SaaS business at scale that has an actual open source client, the official one. And so yes, thousands of developers are contributing up. So like, but isn't there a risk there? Somebody could just fork your client and make their own new expense. I would copy you and like I guess good luck guys. I mean, like why? Like doing that doesn't make it better. So like cool. Now you've got your, you know, Blake's expenseify with zero users. And so it's like, okay, fine, have fun. But like that's not the code is not the important part. It's the community that's the important part. And that's the thing that you can't say. You can't steal. Right. Yeah, if you clone Twitter, well, people have tried. Yeah, exactly. It's like we have to kind of cast a podcast community. We're halfway there, Blake. We could just go forth to code now. Okay, that's right. That's right. So open source. So you've got you've got contract developers. You can put out a job. You can have somebody contribute code. You don't have to go out and hire an army of very expensive software engineers. Oh, yeah. And so what's cool about that is so we actually, so we've so many developers, so many more than we actually need. They're just, it's weird actually. They're fighting over these jobs. In the tune that they've made it, custom scripts says that basically, when we post a new job, we'll get like a dozen applications within like a millisecond. And other developers are like, that's not fair. We're like, I don't know, seems pretty good to us. And so our constraint is not basically the execution capability of like fixing bugs or whatever it is. The constraint is the product management of like, how does this work? Because actually it's so much harder to make something simple than it is to make something complicated. And so we had to think very hard about the patterns to make sure they work in a sort of consistent fashion. And this is great phrase I really love. It's basically like, you know, even with nine women, you can't make a baby in one month. And so basically, some things just take time. If you want to do something, it's just, it's just, it's important to take the time to do it right. And so we're building something that is a really difficult sophisticated tool that requires a lot of careful preparation. And the 140 people that we have are all participating all day on how do we make the best possible tool. And then once we've distilled it down to like, okay, and therefore, build this particular feature. By that time, like all the hard decisions have been made and it's just basically find some implemented. That's to say that things can't go still wrong after that. But the hardest decisions are already made before that started. So you've built a process to capture the requirements, a process to post, a process to review the code before it's checked back in. And that's where you focus the energy on, not hiring and putting layers of management. Yeah, exactly. And I think, because again, you don't, you don't need 10 times of creativity to have a business 10 times the same. You need to have the ability to execute on your core strategy on 10 times the scale. But the execution basically can be scaled out through contractors. And the creativity can be sort of contained and centralized. And it seems like getting bigger often slows you down. And we saw that with Twitter, like Elon to mention that again, right? Elon fired 80% of the people that worked at Twitter and the company's still running, which is kind of astonishing. People didn't think it was possible. But what does that say? What does that say about scale? I mean, I think that we've seen this again and again, everywhere I've worked, like, you know, prior to expense five, it's basically like 80%. Like 20% of people do all the value. In 80% else to fill up, you, you know, collect paycheck. And I think that's that's the common case. And I think it's because most companies are based in the hierarchy and there's so many places to hide in the hierarchy. When it expenseify, like we don't have any managers, and our compensation is determined by vote. And so everyone in the company votes in everyone else's compensation. It's a bit too old and it's basically, who do you think should be able to like Oliver, David Leary, pick left or right? And then you've basically do this 7,000 times each at a new ranked everyone against everyone else in the company. And then everyone in the company does that. You've got this very large data set of basically. Here's what everyone thinks everyone else should be paid. So the filter it condenses it down by the power curve sort of thing. And then you get basically like, okay, here's how compensation works by algorithm. And so it's very hard, hard to hide in expense of five. Because there's everyone's looking at everyone else. And everyone's basically trying to hold everyone else to speak to the fire in a constructive and positive way. But because we're such a small group of people, we're very in tune with what everyone's doing. So David, I want to close out, I should say, Leary, I want to close out with a question about support unless you have anything else. Yes, but we'll do support. Now do you have a kind of a more inspirational question or a challenge for Dave after that? So we'll do our last two. I'll go first. So this ties into that whole discussion of, you know, how many employees expense I has in scale. One of the biggest barriers to adoption of expense five that I heard in years past from accountants was the support that there wasn't as much handholding. You just couldn't get the support you needed as a firm to roll this out to clients. But you have made some big changes and those were announced at expenseicon. Can you tell us how support is changing for accountants? Yeah, I'd say if you can just dial back the path of support is meant to be. Company is growing. A number of customers going up and under support engagements are going up quickly. But we're still a very small company. And we were giving very white glove personal experience to customers and to accountants and things like this. And it just wasn't, it became very, very difficult to scale from a hiring perspective and training perspective and so forth. Because everyone in our company is a creative journalist. There's no one, the 140 employees. No one is on a commission. No one basically has like quotas or KPIs. It's a very eye-trust collaborative environment which works up to a certain scale. If you want to scale beyond that you have to go to like, you know, how do you have quotas, commissions, KPIs and things like this. And it's just kind of a management problem. And so we actually had this very difficult decision to be able to change the entire corporate culture to support basically a large in-house team of sales and support agents. Or can we find a way to do that through contractors just like we've done for the developers? And so we pulled back and it was very, very controversial in the organization because it's basically, it's like, wow, we're giving really high end support. And there's a lot of relationships built and like, but we just can't scale it out. Pulled back, dialed into basically lean heavily into our concierge AI to give, we took it from like two day response times to two minute response times for every single support conversation. We built a bunch of AI stuff. We built all this, like, you know, figured out how to outsource this very complicated thing and a global 24-7 scale cost-effective fashion. Then we scaled up, it's now our support, like, for, in what talked to concierge is like, it is incredibly fast response times. The best use of support you're going to get in the industry bar none. Then we took the same approach towards account managers, basically, it's like, okay, now we're going to give basically every single customer a dedicated account manager and figure out how that works and how do we scale that. And I was like, take a huge exercise. And we said, okay, let's do the same thing with the accounting partners. And basically go back to a lot of these relationships that we kind of let, you know, whether on the vine, honestly. And it recognized it's like, hey, you know what, we had a lot of soul fortune to do. And now we're back and we're able to actually support and scale with you in a way that we just couldn't have done before. I think it's meant to climb to a high degree. It's about trying to show our commitment to the industry. I thought that commitment has ever wavered. We just weren't able to execute on that commitment, basically, with our previous structure. And now we can, and that's going to scale forward. And so now the dream is, you know, when you onboard a client with X-Scientify, it'll be immediately paired with a guide or sort of with an onboarding specialist that will sit down with your clients and do basically anything you want them to do. Like, there's just your person to tell what to do. Do you want them to go and give them, if you have instructions? It's like, you want to set up any of your clients in this particular way? Cool. Like, will this tell us what to do and we'll do it because obviously we're motivated. Like, we get paid after the activity, not before the activity. And so we have a strong vested interest in getting them instead of correctly. So we'll just expand your firm with our talent. And then after their setup, we'll migrate them to an account manager to hold onto them forever. And so you should only be doing high end, high value accounting decisions. You should not be doing basically daily check ins and reminders and nagging and repetitive configurations. Like, that's our job. Let us do that for you. And so I'd say this approach is that we want to be, and I think that we safely are actually, have the best partner and clients and accounting support in the industry bar none for the largest range of customers. Because we don't quite often only talk to enterprise customers. Like, we'll talk to you at small business clients, which are most, you know, most firms have primarily small business clients and that's our bread and butter. So I think that there is a path to get to where we are right now and it was a bumpy path. But I think it's a path that's basically the end of us and we definitely have the best accounting and client support in the industry and maintain the heat that way. So maybe it can close on this a little bit. So obviously in our podcast, all of this, there's no, there's an accountant shortage. And you even slightly referenced it a little bit in your opening keynote at ExpensiveCon. And so my wife's in the education system, she's a school counselor. And so it's a top-getter house as well. Like, you know, how do we get people at the high school level, eighth graders, freshmen, interested in possibly pursuing accounting as a career. And then you had George Clooney on stage at ExpensiveCon. You and George had a conversation. He was mentioning one of the things he was doing where his foundation is helping small businesses of some type. I don't remember any of the details. But what evolved from that was like, hey, can expenseify like help get more, make accounting more cool. So more kids try to do accounting. And I was thinking about it a lot. And I told my wife, if any company can do it, it's going to be ExpensiveCon because you have a vested interest because every eighth grader eventually is going to have to file an expense report. So you could pursue this on the long, right? And even if you don't, even if you're not successfully given them to become accountants, you still get a victory out of this. So just throwing that out there, could you help solve the talent shortage? Well, I think actually part of it is about emphasizing the important value of the industry and get away from sort of like the mundane compliance aspects. Like no one's in this industry because like, I fucking love compliance. They're there because I was like, no, I love to like help people succeed. And I think we need to get more focus on that. But also maybe on added the coolest actor. I thought George, I think that was a really fun experience, to kind of talk with him. And I thought he was a lot of really insightful things to say in his foundation. In particular, how it's foundations using forensic accounting to track down basically like dictators and the finances and then getting like how, you know, switch a land or America or anyone like the Treasury Department is willing to shut down financials and dictators. But someone has to show them that it's their money in the first place. And so I would love to figure it away. Like, you know, in one or three, pro bono law, like representation is very common. Like every big firm has it. In the accounting industry, why doesn't every accounting term have a pro bono forensic accounting organization that collectively is dividing and conquering basically all of the world's dictators and then tracking down all of the financial flows? That would be fucking cool. If you could join a firm and like, oh, actually, and then, you know, 10 to 10 years of time, it's tracking down dictators. Like, okay, I'm gonna take that job. That sounds like a much more satisfying job. And it doesn't. So I think it's using the skills that you have and using the tools you have to make a better impact upon the world and also make your job way more fun. Or scale that out to high school kids. Like, I mean, yeah, it's like, it's like, there's two options for saving the world. One, join the military or two, become an accountant. They're about the same, you know, what is a little safer? That's great. I love what George Clooney said on stage. He said, you know, we tried shaming dictators and it doesn't work. But when we cut off their funding, that works. That changes the behavior, right? Yeah. And I think this is what comes back to, it's like, we talked about, we want to make an environment for a transactional conversation that affects things in the real world. It's not like a soap in that work where you just like, show up and like shoot the shit and like kind of talk for a while. And like, nothing happens. In the real world, money changes hands. Like, if you want to impact the real world, it's expensive. People have to like spend their money and go out in the world and do stuff. And so I think that if you want to impact the world in a positive way, in your personal life, in your community, in your business, or even on the other side of the globe, tracking down the Sudanese dictators or whatever it might be, I feel like accounting is actually a big part of that. And I think that we need to make people more focused on the positive impact of the industry and less distracted by the compliance bullshit. That's a great way to end it. David Barrett of Expensify, it's been a pleasure speaking with you today. Thanks. Always a pleasure.