Expensify S-1 IPO

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2 points·marc__1··3 comments

You know how sometimes we have those threads where someone asks why Uber has 27,000 employees or why Groupon has a headcount 6000, and then there's and lengthy response elaborating why actually, they need that many.

Well here is Expensify with only 130 employees. And they seem to be thriving. It really makes me wonder why some startups out there have so many people.

I've been reading through the S1 this afternoon and, among other little interesting tidbits, found this quote:

> one of our business strategies is to supplement our small core team of generalists with a large number of specialist contractors, managed by third-party vendors, from around the world. For example, we rely on certain third-party vendors to provide a specialized on-demand workforce to provide 24/7 real-time chat support and free phone onboarding for every Expensify.com member.

My read on this is that they have a pretty large force of external vendors. We know[0] they used Mechanical Turk heavily in the past for receipt parsing, and elsewhere in the S1 they talk about using contract softrware devs. My guess is that between outsourced software dev, outsourced customer support reps, and outsourced receipt parsing, their actual workforce is at least double their FTE count.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15796189

Still... 260 employees is not a lot. And most companies outsource customer support these days. Especially if it's 24/7.

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