[Expensify] Work like a boss in our San Francisco Lounge with complimentary cocktails, espresso.....
tl;dr - Whether you live in San Francisco or are just passing through, come work alongside other digital nomads at our brand new Expensify Lounge!
- What: Indulge in fabulous espresso drinks, craft cocktails, and astonishing views
- Where: 16th floor of 88 Kearny St, San Francisco – in the heart of the financial district
- When: Starting April 24th, open M-F, 8 am to 6 pm
- How: Just show up, sign in to wifi, and Concierge will deliver drinks to your seat
Capacity's limited, and we're currently admitting on a first-come-first-serve basis, so come early and stay for sunset champagne sabering!
Does your office look like this? Ours does! And yours can too, because our ufficio es su ufficio:
During COVID, we went through an amazing transformation from an office space to this lounge for any Expensify member to work out of as often as they like, with complimentary drinks of all kinds.
Think of it like "high-end airport lounge" meets "co-working space", optimized for like-minded individuals -- coffee in the morning and cocktails at night (or the reverse, no judgment) -- built into your existing Expensify membership, for as low as $9/mo.
Because Expensify isn't just a tool, it's a way of life. It's a community of people who want to GSD while living rich, having fun, and saving the world. Meet other members of the community in person, and not only is the first round on us, all of them are.
If you’re in San Francisco, come on in! If you’re somewhere else, reply to this email with the city you live in to help us choose our next lounge location.
-david
Founder and CEO of Expensify
Questions? Ask me on Twitter! @dbarrett
PS: For a bit of backstory, we actually started this pre-COVID, in response to a strange problem.
Though Expensify started in SF, we’ve been hiring outside of SF for over a decade, and decided to pay everyone SF wages, no matter where they lived. Bit by bit, our SF crew saw that you can succeed at Expensify from anywhere in the world, which led to people questioning if SF was the right place for them and their growing families.
This diaspora was aggravated further by our super high employee retention (2/3rd have been here over 4 years and 20% of folks over 8), which means people grew and their lives changed while here. They got dogs, and spouses, and kids (generally in that order), and kind of concluded they'd had enough of the "San Francisco experience" -- and wanted to try the PDX, NYC, MEL, or LHR experience (where we have other locations), or dozens of other cities around the world, or just become digital nomads entirely.
Slowly but inexorably, we saw attendance in our SF office drop, risking it becoming a very, very well-appointed ghostland. We asked ourselves: "How do we preserve the vibrancy of the office for those who do want to stay in SF?" To answer that question, we started looking at where those who left were going to -- and we realized they were by and large going to far flung locations, and then working out of cafes.
Now, we already have a lot of experience with the WFC (Work From Cafe) lifestyle from our annual trips abroad as a company. And we already knew firsthand that there was something magical about that tiny cafe in Hanoi that made it so much more fun to work from than even the best office in San Francisco. So after a lot of soul searching, we boiled it down to three main components:
1) Great coffee. Not average coffee from some giant vat. Fresh ground, single-origin pour-over coffee. Freshly pulled espresso shots into a steamy cappuccino. Coffee so good you don't feel compelled to go to a coffee shop, because you are already in one.
2) Great cocktails. We've got employees all over the world, so the sun never sets on the Expensify empire. But even when we were all in SF, the startup life doesn't end at sunset -- and at some point, you've just had too much coffee and want a change. Sometimes you want to code with a hand-mixed Old Fashioned by your side, kept cold by a giant ice cube. The Ballmer Peak is real.
3) Great company. But not your company. The one thing a cafe has that your office doesn't, is someone you work beside, but not with. As social media lowers barriers to meeting people online, it raises them between us in person, and the cafe is the last bastion where you can credibly meet someone new -- to hear a new perspective or discover a new opportunity.
Armed with these epiphanies, we did what anybody would do: turn our office into the best co-working cafe in the city. We added a ridiculously over-the-top cocktail bar like you'd find tucked away in a Tokyo highrise and put in an espresso bar even us Portland coffee snobs can respect. Then we paired it with our integrated chat Concierge to offer to-your-seat delivery, powered it with our New Expensify chat system, and then dialed up the overall furnishings to 11.
And you're welcome to come work here. I guarantee it's better than your office, or any office, and it's designed to be a better place to work than any cafe in the city, too.
But the open secret is that we didn't actually do it for you. We did it for us, to make our own lives better by having you in them. So if you come by, we don't say "thank you" to be polite. We mean it, we're glad to have you here.
