[Expensify] Peep our podcast: Live Rich, Have Fun, Save the World
tl;dr - Visit https://expensify.com/podcast to hear my chat with Eric Ries, author of “The Lean Startup” and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, about carrying on in the face of failure and the similarities between serial entrepreneurs and serial killers -- and then another with CJ McCollum, shooting guard for the Portland Trail Blazers, about journalism, philanthropy, and wine making!
Apologies in advance for what I imagine seems a little scattered.
By now I'm sure you realize we are aiming to do something much, much bigger than simple expense reports. Between the rapid, back-to-back launches of our free corporate card, free invoicing and bill pay features, new Expensify.cash beta app/website, and most recently, the Expensify.org community justice grant challenge -- it might seem a little disconnected at first blush. But you'll need to take my word for it that they are all laying down a critical foundation for what we aim to be the first true “preaccounting super-app”: a chat-centric reimagination of all things payments, both inside and outside of the workplace. Sorta like WeChat, for everyone else.
But the platform isn't the important part. It's the people that the platform enables to come together who matter. We don't view these people as “users", so much as “members” of our growing Expensify community.
Granted, that might sound a little hokey right now: it's unlikely you feel part of some broader community of people who submit expense reports, and it's probably hard to imagine how you ever could. But we feel there's a community (or at least, could be a community) united by these three common, even universal goals:
- Live Rich. This isn't “getting rich” by betting it all on black or hodling to the end of time. It's living rich by having comfortable means, and the time to enjoy it. It's waking up excited to take on the day's inspiring challenges, and returning home with time and energy to spare. Living rich is the freedom from fear, whether physical, emotional, or financial. Living rich is establishing a “comfortable baseline", where your most average, boring day, is still pretty great.
- Have Fun. This isn't “easy fun” you have on a daily basis -- it's not referring to Netflix-n-chill fun, or Minecraft survival fun. This is “hard fun” that challenges you, that you gotta psych yourself up for, pull out all the stops for, and (in many cases) recover from afterwards. Hard fun takes time and money, usually a lot of both. Hard fun is usually done with others: sometimes with people you don't know at the start, but always by the end. Hard fun is the “bucket list” fun you couldn't afford, endure, or even imagine doing more than a few times in your life.
- Save The World. This isn't the celebration of sacrifice for its own sake, or virtue signalling solidarity without action. It's picking a hard, systemic problem, and making a genuine effort to solve it. Save the world means solving problems even if you didn't create them -- and even if you don't experience the effects of that problem yourself. Save the world is about saving others from the fears that prevent them from living rich, from establishing a comfortable baseline that enables them to have fun, and to help save the world, too.
We view these goals to be nearly universal, and work-life balance not so much as a zero-sum game where one goal comes at the expense of the other, but rather like Maslow's hierarchy of needs: each goal complementing and supporting the others. A balanced life is one that spends the most time possible pursuing the overlap of those three goals, enabling you to live rich, have fun, and save the world all at the same time.
Now, that kind of dream sounds too good to be true: it's daunting enough to consider any of these in isolation -- reaching for all three can easily feel the height of hubris.
That's where this podcast comes in.
We believe almost anyone (though sadly, with different amounts of effort) can live a rich, fun life that saves the world -- and we want to not only prove it can be done, but tease out best practices you can apply to your own life. Toward that end, we've assembled a collection of guests that we feel really exemplify one or more of these goals, and ask them: how do you do it? How were you able to not only do something nobody else thought was possible, but weave it sustainably into your rich life?
Each episode of “Live Rich, Have Fun, Save the World” is hosted by me and my smooth-voiced, death-metal frontman Monte, as we dig deep into the what's, why's, and how's of creating a full and balanced life. We're almost done recording the first season, and it's taken some turns but I think we're really starting to dial in the format. But don't take my word for it, check it out! To listen, just click here -- no podcast player needed:
Alternatively, if Spotify is more your jam, you can listen to it here:
https://open.spotify.com/show/5vRzWR1HxYr5SfayS6uzpW
Either way, I'd be honored if you'd give it a listen, and lmk then on Twitter who else you think I should bring on as a guest:
Thanks, I look forward to hearing from you soon!
-david
Founder and CEO of Expensify
