I love the juxtaposition in one of the first pictures of this super advanced contraption being rolled into place using plywood and logs.
It totally looks like it could be a still from the a movie where medieval humans discover some sort of crazy alien artifact and drag it back home to put in the middle of their town as a trophy.
I would love to see these offices turned into housing as much as anyone, but I also recommend reading this amazing NYT article on why it's not quite so simple as just rezoning or a simple interior remodel - https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/11/upshot/office...
This is very interesting, but it assumes the predicate that separated apartments with individual kitchens and bathrooms are the right way for people to live. And 1 BR and studios at that.
These are buildings designed for communal occupancy as offices, why not lean into that as residences? Think like a 1-2 floor cooperative housing for a community of 50-100 people in 25-50 family units. Everyone gets private bedrooms, storage, and a den. But the expensive amenities that foster community are shared:
Large commercial-style communal kitchens and bathrooms. That would enable other big shared amenities on the floor like a gym, a daycare, or coworking desks.
The epidemic of loneliness plaguing millennials is in my estimation largely due to a lack of community. Think of the kind of community that was east to build at university - why can’t we have that in the conversion of these big floor plates
Agreed - a friend in Tokyo mentioned that his neighborhood had small apartments that didn't have their own bathrooms but instead came with unlimited access to the public bathhouse down the street. If you were down with that tradeoff you could get an apt in a super desirable neighborhood for ~$300/mo.
Sounds like an amazing option to me, but totally prevented by zoning / regulations in the US.
that's actually a great idea. While it's certainly not for everyone, if you don't like it there's every other apartment to choose. It's great to have options from the monotony of the usual apartments.
I just looked this up since I have bamboo floors I'm considering refinishing, and this resource[0] seems reputable and indicates that it's very doable but you should wear PPE to protect yourself.
edit: we charge no fees since our ops are supported by our donors - the only fee that gets taken out is that charged by our brokerage for selling the crypto
> If circumstances make Giver to that particular Nonprofit impossible or inappropriate (such as if the selected Nonprofit ceases operations or loses its tax-exempt status), we will attempt to contact you first for additional preferences on where you would like your Donation to go. If we do not receive your preferences before we must disburse the funds, then we may in our sole discretion select an alternate Nonprofit to receive the Donation. We will do our best to direct your Donation to a Nonprofit in a similar space and/or with similar goals. Except in cases of fraud, we do not issue refunds.
If I can get Andy or ZSF representative to say they'll claim it from every.org I'd consider that. I can't find any obvious disclosure about margin/overhead from Every.org but I might still consider it despite that.
This not a surprising term. By accepting donations to be passed on to someone else, they become trustees, which comes with hefty legal constraints. By having terms saying "we will try our best, but if we fail, we will try to honour your intentions", they can avoid winding up with little piles of money that can't be repurposed and simply ... exist.
No, I don't think it's surprising and I'm glad it's there. But it's the reason that I was nervous about donating absent an affirmative response that ZSF would claim the money. It's nice they'd try to apply it to similar projects but I'd prefer it go to Zig or nothing (or I can donate to another project of my choice).
Just to note - unless we can't reach you, we usually end up just crediting the donor's account with a balance that they can use to support any of the other nonprofits on the platform, so usually you do get to donate to another project of your choice :)
Great question - we have more info on how we disburse at https://www.every.org/disbursements - but in short, ZSF hasn't claimed their profile and connected a bank account, so we'd disburse via our partner NFG. We treat crypto donations like those made via bank account, meaning we cover the 2.25% fee that NFG charges, so (100% of your crypto donation - broker fee (<=1%)) goes to ZSF.
Hey just a heads up, you said 1 hour ago "you can donate via their profile here" and then 30 mins ago Andy comments and says he's making an account as we speak..
Did you just solicit donations without them even being signed up? If so, that feels weird, and I'd appreciate at least (as I cant speak for others) if you didn't do that without some heavy disclaimer text making clear that they've shown no interest yet. I love the concept of what your service does, but you can get users in other more honest ways than this.
How it works according to their website is that they will mail a check to the registered address of the charity. That's actually an amazing service - even charities which are not aware of Every.org still benefit from its existence.
I can appreciate that you derive value from this, however, envision it from Joe Casual walking by, it has in my case discouraged me from using their service because to me this feels dishonest in a lie-of-omission way. I'm not calling them dishonest, I'm not saying anybody lied, I'm saying the marketing and recruitment strategy should encourage people to use it, not use gray patterns like the ones random voip text people do about "claiming your funds" and such. It's just relating my personal experience and perception of it for the purposes of helping them make a better product, that's all.
I have a text message from just today after lunch with a link to click to claim my funds. No name, no context, just a random text that I can only imagine isn't in fact free money waiting for me.
Thanks for this feedback, and I definitely think we could do a better job of making it clear which orgs we have a direct relationship with vs not.
That being said, Network for Good, our partner for disbursing to nonprofits whom haven't connected directly with us, also handles disbursements for a lot of Facebook Giving and other large donation platforms, so I don't think the checks coming from there are necessarily unexpected by many nonprofits - see their support article on this at https://networkforgood.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/1150073...
Their terms are pretty clear that it's how they work. I don't know that it's dishonest but it is slightly tricky IMO. It seemed like it was the case when I clicked on it and it would be nicer if it were obvious before donating.
But bottom line they'd have gotten the money delivered to ZSF anyways.
True, in this case it goes to a worthy cause and it seems as if Andy is thrilled by the ability to get a check mailed, so obviously there's utility, there's no disputing that... It's just you don't need gray patterns to attract people to things that are awesome.
Wow, thank you for sharing this. I was not aware of Every.org until today. I checked out the platform just now and am delighted. I love that it is a 501(c)(3) and that it is crystal clear with the promise to remain that way. We desperately needed something like this.
I also love that you will mail checks to organizations even if they do not sign up for electronic disbursement. However I will sign up ZSF now of course :)
Ok sounds like I can go ahead because you will accept from every.org and you do not plan to publish an address to accept donations directly?
I'll match other HNers donations of as much as $100 to a total of an additional $1000. Not sure how to substantiate every.org donations but maybe I'll take HNers at their word.
EDIT: scoreboard as of 22:20 UTC: $400 out of $1000 to be matched: easymuffin, slimsag, tav, _hl_.
Because we need some kind of time bound, I'll leave this matching window open for the next 48 hours, so ~21:20 UTC on Saturday (this is ~5pm US Eastern time IIRC).
Is that conditional on donating via some cryptocoin? I'd be up for donating a well-deserved $100 (can't really afford much more right now sadly) but prefer traditional methods.
Thank you for such a kind comment, and I'm glad we can support your and the foundation's work! I've just shared this with my team, it makes everyone's day when we get feedback like this <3
More likely every forecast would be either extreme heatwave or bitter cold snap headed your way. Similarly useless but a higher probability that you to click to find out more..
My family has a simple apartment in the outskirts of Tokyo, and we've occasionally toyed with the idea of renting it to foreigners for for cheapish (~$400/mo). If you don't go too crazy with fancy dining or anything like that, then I think living in Tokyo for ~$600 / mo isn't an insane proposition. Here's the website we created if you're interested - https://mitakahouse.omardiab.com/
Just got an email from them about this new chat app they're launching. Curious to hear what HN thinks of it.
Part 1----
When people hear "Expensify", they typically think "expense reports". But with the introduction of the Expensify Card, Concierge Travel, invoice sending, and bill payment features -- all in 2020 -- it's increasingly clear that we're becoming a whole lot more. Indeed, this is why according to Google, more people search for "Expensify" by name than "expense reports" as a whole: what we're building goes beyond any single function. Rather, Expensify can replace several expensive, disconnected services with one fully connected preaccounting platform for a tiny fraction of the cost.
And now I'm happy to offer a sneak peak of our latest addition: open-source financial group chat. Like Slack, SMS, or WhatsApp, but optimized for financial conversations, designed to be used both at work and between friends, and maintained by a community of open source developers.
If you're in a hurry, go to https://Expensify.cash to join the waitlist. And if you are a developer, share your GitHub handle to skip to the front of the line, and check out our Upwork jobs to earn some extra cash over the holiday break. But if you've got time, pour a stiff cup of eggnog and read on...
Now, when we launched the Expensify Card, people "got it". It's very tightly connected to expense management, so it makes sense. Same goes for Concierge Travel booking -- it feels pretty close to expense management. Invoicing and bill pay were a bit more surprising to people, as those have historically been different industries. But expense management sits in a company's accounts payable/receivable department, and all these do too, so it generally makes sense.
Chat -- even financially-optimized group chat -- is less obvious. And launching open-source (where anybody can see and contribute to the code) is even less obvious still. To help make sense of that, let me explain two radical beliefs that underpin everything we do.
So... you just happened to hear about this new chat app and you just happened to post literally the longest sales pitch I ever read on Hacker News, and I mean longer by an order of magnitude? Mind disclosing your relationship with these folks on whom you are lavishing all your attention?
Expensify's CEO really does send out these exceptionally long and conversational marketing emails, apparently to anyone who ever used (or was required to use) their app. It's a somewhat charming approach in its own way, but the emails were quite frequent and not always that interesting so I unsubscribed.
However: because Expensify does have that habit, I don't think it's unreasonable that the poster just happened to receive this marketing email.
I'm a customer which is why I got the email. I posted it because I think it's a pretty fascinating and unusual product announcement from a fairly well-known startup, and the way it's written (and its length) is a big part of that.
I could've summarized the claims, but I don't think that would've done it justice haha.
Honestly I don't understand why this comment is getting flagged, or why people seem so offended by it. To me at least I clicked on the link and I was so confused as to why they would launch a chat app. I found this added context interesting/helpful (which is what I think you intended by posting this).
First, Expensify's long-term product vision derives from a core belief:
Payments and chat are the same thing.
Every payment is a structured chat to resolve some kind of debt tension that exists between two people. The way we see it, there is a spectrum of functionality between "freeform chat" and "expense management" -- and every form of payment is somewhere on that spectrum:
* Expense management is the most sophisticated form of payment possible: it's a complex transaction with coding, accounting, and legal ramifications, that requires documentation and auditing, that reconciles to various accounts, and goes through a complex approval workflow before reimbursement. It's truly the most complex workflow a company will ever experience, and exists as a kind of structured chat: to submit an expense is to formally state "I have made purchases A, B, and C in line with expense policy X, as demonstrated by documentation Y, and hereby formally request reimbursement from Z." Expense management is really just a kind of templated chat system, optimized for this highly constrained but extremely complex kind of conversation.
* Invoices are pretty much the same kind of complex conversation as expense management, but with a simpler approval structure (because your customer is expected to pay all or nothing) and more knowledgeable participants (removing employees who don't care about the accounting).
* Corporate travel booking (a subset of procurement as a whole) is also like expense management, but simpler still: a structured chat between the employee and the travel manager to make purchases in line with a travel policy.
* Freeform chat is really just the same common structure, but with all the constraints and workflow removed.
Accordingly, everything we've done to date is largely just research: we had to become a major player in all these separate industries in order to ensure we understood them at an incredibly deep level, as well as to lay down a technical and legal platform that enables us to operate freely in all of them.
But none of that was ever the goal; that was just a tool to learn -- and Expensify.cash is a from-scratch reimplementation of everything we've learned to date, atop the most thoroughly modern technology available, wiping away all technical debt in one fell swoop.
Interested in helping us build the future? That's great! Here's how:
3. You will be immediately granted access to the web/desktop
version of the app, and we will reach out to invite you to the TestFlight for iOS, or Google Play beta for Android
4. You will also be invited to a Slack channel to talk with our team in realtime (yes, I'm aware of the irony; help us move this to an Expensify.cash channel soon!)
5. Read CONTRIBUTORS.md to learn how to get started
6. Pick an open job in Upwork, and go!
7. So we believe payments and chat are the same thing, and we have been steadily building our product platform with that in mind, all along. However, there's a second belief that is also important to understand:
Yea that's what it seems like to me too. Though it's fascinating to see where you can end up with one incorrect core belief and a large engineering team behind you.
Looks very much like that, doesn't it. It reminds me of an awful job I had in uni, where we had a sales trainer come in, and to him literally everything you could possibly think of was selling (or an opportunity to sell if was an interaction of any kind).
Part 3----
Financial chat is 100x bigger than expense reports.
Most people are surprised to hear that Expensify was never intended to be a pure expense management system. Nor was it intended to be exclusively a back office tool -- or even a business tool.
In fact, 99% of our users are not accountants: they are individual employees just trying to GSD, in both their professional and personal lives. This is no accident. QuickBooks Online, the most popular cloud accounting tool in the world, only has 5 million users… and we already have 10 million. Personal payment tools like Venmo and Square Cash have gotten to tens of millions -- and it's clear a hundred million is within striking distance.
But there's no way any of those will get to a billion users: they just aren't solving a problem experienced by a billion people. There's only one use case that unites every single person, and that's chat. And there are many examples of billion-user chat networks: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, WeChat, Twitter, etc.
Accordingly, even though we look like a narrowly focused expense management tool on the surface targeting accountants and business travelers -- what we've actually been building under the hood is the foundation of a much, much larger system more akin to a social network than an enterprise system. So we are much closer to the start of our "S-curve" journey than the end.
(If you're not familiar with the classic "S-curve" followed by nearly every VC-backed company, it works like this:
Things grow very slowly while they build their product and figure out market fit. During this period they raise "seed" or "early stage" funding to pay the bills before they start making money.
Once things start to work, they tend to accelerate very rapidly as they establish their position, and then raise a bunch of "growth capital" -- dumping it all immediately into customer acquisition, generally at a significant loss (ie, "growth at all costs") because they are competing against other VC-backed companies in the same space, using the exact same strategy. So the only way to "differentiate" is to raise and spend more wantonly than your competition in a kind of "prisoner's dilemma" (or even, a game of "chicken") where everyone loses, but you hope others lose more.
Eventually you run out of "low-hanging fruit" (even though that fruit is kind of rotten in the first place seeing as how you are losing money on every customer), and growth decelerates. At this time you raise "late-stage capital" and focus on tiny incremental improvements -- scraping the bottom of the barrel harder and harder -- basically just accepting that your glory days are behind you, and wherever you are is pretty much all you're going to have. The $100MM ARR mark is a common threshold for when VC's lose interest in sinking money into an unprofitable company, and are starting to look to sell. This is typically the point when the founders and VCs (but rarely the employees -- they are usually diluted to nothing from all the fundraising) "exit" by going public or getting acquired, with employees sticking around as long as their "golden handcuffs" keep them from leaving.
Every company differs in the details, but almost all of them follow that path -- there are literally thousands of VC backed companies that follow this path quietly, in obscurity, making VCs and founders rich, but achieving very little real world traction, and inevitably being vacuumed up by one of the mega-companies that acquire and digest these startups by the dozens.)
So given that we're a VC-backed "unicorn" startup crossing the $100MM threshold, you might assume we're entering that third stage, and that the future of Expensify is going to just be more of the same.
You'd be wrong.
The reality is we're still in that first stage, still researching the market, building the core platform, and perfecting product market fit. The way we see it, we haven't even begun our "growth stage". Rather, we've been steadily checking off the boxes for our core financial functionality, and are only just now starting to put serious effort toward mass customer acquisition. That's where Expensify.cash comes in.
In a way, you can think of Expensify like a startup developing an experimental COVID vaccine -- but selling a highly profitable cough medication to pay the bills. No matter how good that cough medicine business might seem on the outside, it's nothing compared to the potential value of eradicating COVID. Expensify.com is our cough medicine, and Expensify.cash is our vaccine -- going into human trials, right now.
And "human trials" isn't much of an exaggeration: at the moment Expensify.cash feels like a standalone chat application, that you sign into using your standard Expensify login. You can chat, send pictures, the basics. But under the hood, it's a complete rewrite of the Expensify front end, built on a radical new React Native platform that uses the same codebase across not just iOS and Android, but also web and desktop. That means Expensify.cash works exactly the same whether you open it up with a laptop browser, your mobile browser, or install the mobile app, or even install our standalone desktop app. I could be wrong, but I think we're the first company to even attempt this at any significant scale.
So even though what Expensify.cash does is pretty familiar, how it does it is very novel: it's pretty bleeding edge stuff. Not only is it built using the absolute latest React Native capabilities, but it's using our own Onyx platform to enable it to work seamlessly offline and on (so you can read and write chats while offline and it'll "catch up" the next time it connects online). There are still a lot of kinks to work out -- and we'd love your help doing it.
For this reason, we're initially limiting access to Expensify.cash to developers (and anyone they invite): go to https://Expensify.cash to sign in and provide your GitHub handle, then go to https://github.com/Expensify/Expensify.cash to check out the code (open sourced using the MIT license).
Additionally, we've intentionally left a bunch of small bugs unfixed to create some easy ways to get involved -- and are paying top dollar to fix them. Check out our list of Upwork jobs if you're looking for some side income over this holiday season, and we intend to funnel every issue we can there to create steady opportunities going forward.
It's an exciting time, as this launch has been a very long time coming, and officially kicks off the start of our "growth stage" in the S-curve. It's the start of something really special, and it would be our honor to have you help us test and build it!
-david
Founder and CEO of Expensify
Ask me anything at @dbarrett on Twitter!
Q: Is the Expensify that I use today going away?
No. That's why we're launching Expensify.cash as a totally separate site and app. Expensify.com will remain entirely as it is today for the foreseeable future.
Q: Do I need to create a new Expensify.cash account?
No. Your existing Expensify.com account works with Expensify.cash -- they use the same back end database, and the same actual account behind the scenes. Expensify.cash is just a rewrite of the "front-end" -- the part that runs on your laptop or phone.
Q: Should I use Expensify.com or Expensify.cash?
Unless you are a developer looking to contribute to a new open source project, and to help build the next generation of Expensify, you should keep using Expensify.com.
Q. When will non-developers be able to use Expensify.cash?
Only if a developer invites them. So find a software developer buddy of yours and ask them to sign up. In the meantime, sign in to join the waitlist, and you'll be first in line when it's ready for you.
Q: Why would I use this over email?
With apologies to Mark Twain: the death of email has been greatly exaggerated. Odds are you are reading this as an email right now. Email is here to stay, and Expensify.cash is designed to complement email, not compete with it. Every Expensify.cash conversation generates an email summary for you -- and your email response will be sent out via mobile push or SMS text message based on whomever you are talking with. But at some point, when the conversation gets serious enough that it goes "realtime," using realtime chat is usually more convenient than a zillion tiny emails.
Q: Why would I use this over Slack?
For the same reason a Google Workspace customer might pick Google Meet over Zoom -- it does the same thing, except without costing any extra, and in a way that will be more optimized for complex financial conversations. Furthermore, the vast majority of our customers don't use Slack, so most customers aren't even asking this question.
Q: Why would I use this over WhatsApp or SMS?
Those tools are great for one-to-one conversations, as well as a small number of relatively low-volume, small group conversations. But when you really sit down to GSD with a group of people, the volume of chats and overall complexity of the conversation gets hard to manage with those simple tools. Slack solves that with "channels" and "threads" and "reactions" and a number of other features -- all of which are coming to Expensify.cash, along with our own deeply embedded financial tools to manage group expenses.
Q: Why not just build this into Expensify.com?
In a way, we have: our new Concierge chat system was an early form of this. And our Concierge chat system was really just an upgrade to our report commenting system. Accordingly, this "new" chat platform is actually already used by millions of people to talk with Concierge, or to "chat" with other users via report comments. However, to get the full benefit of React Native and Onyx, it requires a much more serious rewrite than can be done incrementally. Over time we will gradually expand Expensify.cash with nearly all of Expensify.com's features, and users will naturally migrate from one to another. But we are committed to minimizing disruption to our existing customers, so we opted to build it as a separate app for now.
Q: Does Expensify.cash cost anything?
Nope! For now it's just a free chat tool. Enjoy! However, the long-term goal is to create company-managed "rooms" that would create billable activity just like any other. You can think of Expensify as the "Amazon Prime for back office services": a one stop shop for everything you need to run your business, all with a single inclusive price. Even then it wouldn't cost anything extra, it would just be one more service provided by the Expensify platform.
Q: Why open source Expensify.cash; why not just hire more engineers?
To be clear, we are always hiring engineers -- please send your unemployed friends to we.are.expensify.com. But the key to Expensify's ability to remain so nimble at scale is keeping an extremely small core team of generalists who understand the "big picture" -- and then engaging a large ring of highly talented specialist contractors from around the world to execute that vision. This is how we offer award winning 24/7 realtime chat support with only a couple dozen Concierge employees, as well as immediate free phone onboarding for every user (just click the "call" button on any Inbox task). We believe there is an opportunity to execute that same playbook for our engineering team, pairing our core group of engineering generalists, with a global network of open source engineering specialists. We've already been doing this at a smaller scale with our close partnership with SQLite, and our open-source BedrockDB, so this is just doubling down on what has already been working exceptionally well.
Sent by: Expensify, Inc. - 548 Market St #61434 - San Francisco, CA 94103
