How P2P hackers built an expense management giant

Welcome to Extra Crunch Tuesday

In March, TechCrunch Daily Reporter Anna Heim was interviewing executives at Expensify to learn more about the company’s history and operations when they unexpectedly made themselves less available.

Our suspicions about their change of heart were confirmed on May 3 when the expense report management company confidentially filed to go public.

With a founding team comprised mainly of P2P hackers, it’s perhaps inevitable that Expensify doesn’t look and feel like something an MBA might envision.

“We hire in a super different way. We have a very unusual internal management structure,” said founder and CEO David Barrett. “Our business model itself is very unusual. We don’t have any salespeople, for example.”

Similar to the way companies must file a Form S-1 that describes their operations and how they plan to spend capital, TechCrunch EC-1s are part origin story, part X-ray.

We published the first article in a series on Expensify yesterday:

• “How a band of P2P hackers planted the seeds of a unique expense management giant” (2,400 words/10 minutes) — Explores the founders’ days with a P2P content distribution startup called Red Swoosh (Travis Kalanick’s venture before Uber) and how that experience influenced Expensify’s development.

We’ll publish the remainder of Anna’s series on Expensify in the coming weeks, so stay tuned. Thanks for reading Extra Crunch!

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

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