Wasteful spending

Like a lot of other startups, I feel like we had a ton of wasteful spend back in the early days of the company. When you raise VC money and hire a ton, it was just easy to get lost in software subscriptions, hardware for employees, and stuff for the office.

You start with a cheaper software subscription, add users, and then people forget to monitor that subscription and we run into auto-renewal despite perhaps not using it for the seats we have.

You allow an employee to buy tools to make them more efficient, but then everyone wants that extra monitor, chargers, etc.

We all want swag, but order extra just in case which ends up sitting in a box in the office or in the storage unit.

Unfortunately a lot of the spend didn’t contribute much on the ROI front. I’ve spent some hours this summer donating a lot of these things to high school organizations and Goodwill so that at least someone can use it.

We don’t want to be a company that penny pinches and counts paperclips. But wasteful spending is painful when you start to unravel these things. We’ve done a lot of good work being more diligent about our spend these last couple of years and it’s something I’m proud of.