What makes Expensify special, fundamentally, is that we have a completely different business model. Everyone else in our industry has a top-down acquisition model. They've got a sales team calling into the CFO or whatever. And that model works fine, but it only works in a tiny corner of the marketplace and it's the same market that everyone else was going after.
Our competition is email and Excel. It's like a manila envelope stuffed full of receipts that is the actual competition. And no one is defending it. Our competitors use the same business model. You buy a list of CFOs and then you call that list from top to bottom and then you put them through a qualification [process]. They're all calling the same people off the same list with the same message, selling the same product. And, shocker, it's really hard to compete when you're exactly the same as everyone else.
Our approach is starting with the employee, and then they pull us into the company. The bulk of our revenue is subscription revenue that comes from companies between, let's say, 10 and employees. There's a view that B2C fintech has become increasingly hard, and a B2B approach is more cost-effective. I love that everyone thinks that because that's why they're all failing while we thrive. If you try to apply an enterprise business model in the SMB, those are really different markets.
The economics of top-down acquisition just do not scale well outside of the mid-market. I gotta go acquire it. We need to go to bigger businesses. We're different. We're like, "Screw the enterprise. We will be your very first accounting tool because way before you have revenue, you definitely have expenses. Then we'll grow with you forever. Business travel is back, which is great.
We see a different slice of business travel than I think most because we're more of a Main Street business than a Wall Street business. When people think of business travel, they typically think George Clooney in "Up in the Air," sort of flying around. And that happens. It's obviously a big deal. But there is a huge fraction of business travel which is just mileage, people driving around.
My dad drove around all of Michigan essentially selling machine tools. You drive to Toledo and you stop by the Home Depot and you pick up a whole bunch of materials for the job or something like that. We get way more reimbursements for Home Depot than for United. Business travel is a very humble affair for a huge fraction of our customers. How do you view the market environment going forward, given that we're still in a pandemic?
The pandemic was basically the ultimate stress test of our business model. I think we've weathered it pretty fine. Going forward, so long as we don't have an even worse pandemic, I think we're gonna be just fine.
I'm actually quite optimistic, and I think that our customers are as well. I think we feel we're through the worst of it. I think there's a ton of reasons to be super optimistic, honestly. And I think that that's why we're excited about it. You were very critical of the previous administration. What do you think of the job President Biden is doing? Is there anything that the new administration has done that you are critical of?
I think the vaccine mandates are some really hard calls. I can see value in both perspectives. Obviously the vaccines work and they're wonderful, but at the same time, I think your body is your ultimate line of sanctity.
These are really hard issues. I don't know that I have a real clear opinion to be honest. I think that it's a muddy process. A vaccine or pulling out of Afghanistan — these are huge, multitrillion-dollar issues. These are not clean issues. No one's gonna just knock it out of the park. I think that Biden's doing a great job in the most important thing, and that is he's defending democracy.
I feel very good about the prospects for democracy going forward under the Biden administration. And that's all we're ultimately looking for.
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Power Index. The New Database. Buy Now Pay Later. Rise of Retail Investing. Retail Investing. Transforming Small Business. Health Care. Quantum Computing. Flipboard is betting big on curation as a better way to do social. So we started designing for that, hoping and praying that something would actually happen there.
And lo and behold it did. And then when the iPad came out we really just bet the whole company on it. So we designed something really specifically for the iPad and that really captured this idea. When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad back in January it must have been a pretty big day for the company. Oh it was huge. It was a very big deal for us.
Can we build something here? Will it have the capability of doing what we want? So it was really great when it came out, like wow, this is going to be perfect for us. So we downloaded the SDK [software development kit for iPad app developers] that day and started coding that moment. Did you get a curveball that day at all? Was it what you were expecting? It was pretty much what I was expecting. I was thinking there may have been something more with magazines on that day.
But that happened later on when it actually shipped. But no real curveballs though, it was a very exciting day, I was like wow this is going to be amazing. And there were some questions.
But I really believed that it was going to be a hot selling product and it's nice to see that panning out. Evan, having come from Apple, probably had a good idea the iPad was coming, right? But I really wanted to see the tablet pan out. It would be hard to launch a product like this on those other platforms. What the iPad does is it opens people's minds to a new way of doing things. When Flipboard launched, demand was so high for the app that you guys had to limit user-registrations.
What was it like watching that from the inside? We thought it would take a while for people to understand the concept and get used to it and download it. They use it far more intensely than I thought they would. When people started downloading it they were flipping back to on their Facebook pages. It was crazy! They just sat there just flipping. Flipping, flipping, flipping, flipping. That stuff takes server time. We have to build pages for every few hundred posts that we go out and get.
Immediately we knew that we were going to have an issue. Luckily we had put in a governor in the system. So I wanted a way to restrict new users from coming on. We built in a very crude way of doing that. Mergers and acquisitions. New business. Social media. So You Want My Job. The future of work. The Making Of Today's Office. World Creative Rankings. By Bennett Bennett - September 4, Share to Twitter. Share to LinkedIn. Share to Facebook. Like what you see? Sign up.
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