Eric Friedrichsen vs David Barrett

Eric Friedrichsen

CEO of Chrome River Technologies

BIO: As CEO of Emburse, Eric drives the overall strategic direction of the organization, from new market growth through to product direction. Eric has nearly 30 years of experience driving growth for software companies. Prior to Emburse, he was Global Head of Commercial, SMB and Growth Markets for Marketo, a division of Adobe. Before joining Marketo, he was SVP and General Manager for SAP’s North American mid-market and ecosystems division. Earlier in his career, Eric had sales, technical, and general management leadership positions at SAP Concur, Business Objects, and Information Builders. Eric has a BBA in Management Information Systems from the University of Iowa. What’s your why? As a company, our charter is to “humanize work.” We have a team of more than 750 who collectively work together to achieve our goal of making people’s business lives much easier and giving them back their precious time so they can focus on the important things at work, at home, and in their communities. As individuals, each person can contribute significantly, but as a group, we can achieve exponentially more. As a father of three, I try to teach my three children exactly the same approach: by collaborating with each other, they can achieve far more than they ever could on their own. It’s a very useful life lesson. What’s your favorite movie? It has to be The Usual Suspects. With its unexpected ending, it’s one of the few movies that I actually wanted to watch over and over again. Every time I see more clues about Keyser Soze’s real identity that I completely missed the first time around. What do you do to relax? I love both road and mountain biking, and Colorado is a great place to live for that. It gives me two extremes: riding up a long hill on my road bike gives me a great opportunity to think with no distractions. On the other hand, going down a rough mountain trail requires 100% concentration or you end up with a broken bone – or far worse! Both types of biking are therapeutic… in their own way. I also thoroughly enjoy watching and coaching our three kiddos in just about every sport you can imagine from soccer to flag football to Taekwondo to skiing. Where’s the best place you visited? My wife and I took a bike tour around Andalucia with some friends. Going from village to village at such a slow place gave us a real opportunity to actually get to know the region and meet local residents. In a car, you simply can’t get that level of intimacy with an area

David Barrett

CEO of Expensify

BIO: David is a lifelong programmer who founded Expensify in 2008 and built it into the most popular preaccounting platform on the planet. He’s recognized as one of the world’s top network engineers, having created Expensify’s blockchain-powered database a year before Satoshi’s white paper on Bitcoin. Prior to Expensify, David led engineering for Red Swoosh — which was acquired by Akamai Technologies in 2007 — and held various roles in 3D graphics and VR development. When he’s not fearlessly leading Team Expensify from Portland, David enjoys playing Minecraft with his daughter.