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Image Credits: Illustration by Nigel Sussman, art design by Bryce Durbin
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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:
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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Image Credits: Peter Finch / Getty Images
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Can you imagine making 13 attempts at something before attaining a successful outcome?
Alex Circei, CEO and co-founder of Git analytics tool Waydev, applied 13 times to Y Combinator before his team was accepted. Each year, the accelerator admits only about 5% of the startups that seek to join.
“Competition may be fierce, but it’s not impossible,” says Circei. “Jumping through some hoops is not only worth the potential payoff but is ultimately a valuable learning curve for any startup.”
In an exclusive exposé for TechCrunch, he shares four key lessons he learned while steering his startup through YC’s stringent selection process.
The first? “Put your business value before your personal vanity.”
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Image Credits: TechCrunch
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Bill.com is buying Divvy, the Utah-based corporate spend management startup that competes with Brex, Ramp and Airbase.
The total purchase price of around $2.5 billion is substantially above the company’s roughly $1.6 billion post-money valuation Divvy set during its $165 million, January 2021 funding round.
Luckily for us, Bill.com released a deck that provides a number of financial metrics relating to its purchase. This will not only allow us to better understand the value of the unicorn at exit, but also its competitors, against which we now have a set of metrics to bring to bear.
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Image Credits: NicoElNino / Getty Images
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Robotic process automation (RPA) has certainly been getting a lot of attention in the last year, with startups, acquisitions and IPOs all coming together in a flurry of market activity. It all seemed to culminate with UiPath’s IPO last month.
The company that appeared to come out of nowhere in 2017 eventually had a final private valuation of $35 billion. It then had the audacity to match that at its IPO. A few weeks later, it still has a market cap of over $38 billion in spite of the stock price fluctuating at points.
Was this some kind of peak for the technology or a flash in the pan? Probably not. While it all seemed to come together in the last year with a big increase in attention to automation in general during the pandemic, it’s a market category that has been around for some time.
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Image Credits: Bloomberg / Getty Images
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Built for Mars CEO Peter Ramsey tears down Twitch’s UX, asking how Twitch rakes in cash and the psychology used within its app to encourage users to keep spending.
Ramsey describes Twitch’s protocol of asking users if they want to subscribe to a streamer before seeing their stream “unnecessarily boolean,” which would be a great band name.
But that’s neither here nor there. Ramsey notes: “Often it’s at the point of clicking, not the final stage of a process, meaning the user decides to buy the item when they click ‘check out now,’ not when they’ve entered their card details and click ‘complete purchase.’”
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Image Credits: wabeno / Getty Images
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Kolide entered a dangerous spin in early 2018, only a year after a Series A fundraise. It had little traction and was quickly burning through sizable cash reserves. It was spinning out of control, certain to hit the ground in no time.
Kolide had a lot going for it that enabled it to recover, but by far the most important was that it recognized it was in a spin very early, and it had enough cash remaining (and therefore sufficient time) to execute a recovery plan.
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Image Credits: Nigel Sussman
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Shares of Square are up more than 6% after the American fintech company reported a staggering $5.06 billion in revenue in its Q1 2021 earnings report, far ahead of an expected tally of $3.36 billion.
By posting the huge revenue beat, Square grew 266% compared to its year-ago Q1. Because that’s the sort of growth that we generally expect to see from early-stage startups instead of maturing public companies, some exploration is in order. In short, bitcoin revenues from Square, and how they fit into its accounting, are responsible for much of its outsized growth.
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Image Credits: Lawrence Anareta / Getty Images
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It’s notable that we’re discussing SPAC deals for media companies at all because a few days ago, CNBC reported that such efforts had come into doubt, noting that the recent SPAC slowdown had led to “digital media companies [reassessing] their timeline on going public.”
What’s going on?
The market is more risk-on than you’ve been led to believe; SPACs are still hunting for deals as their countdown timers tick; record asset prices more generally; and, finally, a booming advertising market coupled with rising belief in consumer-media subscriptions.
For an industry that has been a reported venture-backed letdown in recent years, it could be just about as good a moment as any to get out the door.
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