Thursday, January 23, 2020
Interview with Eric Friedrichsen, Emburse
For our interview today, we talked with Eric Friedrichsen, the CEO of Emburse, a developer of expense management and accounts payable software which has major operations in Los Angeles. Emburse recently merged LA's Chrome River into the company, as part of an effort to combine six different companies in the expense management area.
For those who haven't heard of Emburse, talk about what you do?
Eric Friedrichsen: Emburse is all about expense management and accounts payable automation. If you are an employee of a company, and need to go on a trip for business and need to get reimbursed for that trip, you have to follow the right compliance policies. Ultimately, anytime you need to get reimbursed or when you are spending money on behalf of an employer, such as buying office supplies or other spending through accounts payable, we automate all of that process. Our goal is so that CFOs for all of our customers can feel confident that their policies are being followed, their budgets are being controlled, and at the same time, helping to give back an incredible amount of time for their employees, so they can spend their time doing other things rather than expense reports, either helping to advance the cause of the business, contributing to their communities, and spending more time with their families.
It looks like you've combined quite a few companies together to create Emburse, what's the story behind that?
Eric Friedrichsen: We brought together six different companies. Captio out of Spain, Chrome River, headquartered in Los Angeles, and mostly focused here in the U.S. and Europe as well; Certify, which is also based in the U.S.; Nexonia, which is Canada and the U.S., and Tallie, which is primarily in the US. We brough all six of the companies together, along with a few other pieces of technology we have acquired, and we have brough them all together to really help humanize the work for all of our customers. We are focused on giving employees all of their time back. Each of those companies is independently doing the same or similar thing around expense management and A/P automation. We brought them all together so we can get a lot more scale, and innovate a lot faster, across all six of those expense reporting software platforms.
How did you get involved in Emburse, and what is your background?
Eric Friedrichsen: The reason my background relates so well here, is I worked for Concur for about eight years. Concur, if you're not familiar with it, is a leader in travel and expense management. I was there for eight years, then I went to SAP for a few years, and then I was at Marketo/Adobe for a year. The investors at K1 asked me to get involved bringing these companies together into one company, and ultimately, to be the CEO. I've been in the industry for a long time, and I think we have a unique opportunity to bring a fresh perspective to this market. My previous employer had quite a bit of market share here, and I'm now looking for a way to bring a whole new, fresh perspective to solve this problem of expense management.
How are you handling the challenge of putting together so many companies?
Eric Friedrichsen: The first thing, is we've started to reorganize the structure of the company to take this all into account. We have separate business unit general managers, and we're supporting and innovating on each of those six core platforms that have come from the acquisitions. We have put a general manager in charge of each of them. We expect to innovate significantly in terms of product and partnerships. From a product perspective, we want to be able to take some of the best technology around receipt management, and bring that int our core technology. That will be one core piece of code we will be sharing. Antoher is corporate card technology. One of the companies we acquired was Emburse, which we acquired in July. We acquired them and brought on some really incredible technology that allows you to use a card, which has policies and expense reporting associated with it, and we've taken that same card technology and rolled it out across each of the core platforms.
Will that core software be the same underneath, or how are you handling technology integration?
Eric Friedrichsen: Our core platforms are very tailored for different types of companies, from small companies to large companies, different industries, and different geographies. There's no plan to discontinue any of our core expense platforms. IN fact, we will invest more, and our philosophy is that one size doesn't fit all. We believe if you put the right core expense management product with the right customer, a lot of the shareable technology will fit on top of the platforms. For example, they might use the same card from Emburse, backed by a bank, which will be consistent across all the platforms, which will serve companies of different sizes in different geographies.
What do you think the biggest challenge for you is, as the CEO?
Eric Friedrichsen: There's a lot going on, and lots of moving parts. We're trying to make sure we can communicate clearly to the marketplace who we are. We're just making sure we're doing that well and consistently over the next few weeks and months. That's probably the most critical thing at this point.
Finally, what's next for you?
Eric Friedrichsen: We'll be releasing a momentum report in the next few weeks about our growth, we've had some tremendous organic growth in addition to the acquisition we've made over the last year. We're building on our plan to continue that growth for a long time. At some point, down the line, we'd love to go public. Right now, we're not focused on that, but on building a long term, high growth company that can help our customers humanize work. We're also hiring in the Los Angeles area, where we are particularly focused on technology specialists, research and development, and marketing talent in our LA office. They are high level, high value types of roles. We're expanding our offices in the Mid-Wilshire area, and we may be looking for fresh, larger office space in the future.
Thanks!