Pressure To Be 1st: Scarcity Thinking of a COO | Anu Muralidharan

Join us for a candid conversation with Anu Muralidharan, COO of Expensify, as she shares the deeply personal story of the intense drive and competitive pressure she inherited from her late mother, who taught her that "being second was unacceptable." Anu opens up about how this drive led to debilitating stress and "scarcity thinking," culminating in a rock-bottom moment where she risked it all with the "Seinfeld experiment," quitting her role for an unstructured position at Expensify.   Expensify is the financial software company behind the payments and expense management platform that automatically handles billions of dollars in reimbursements and business expenses.   With a rigorous technical foundation—an engineering degree from the elite BITS Pilani and an MBA from Cornell University—Anu had the credentials, but she was vulnerable with us and shared that she felt stressed and completely unmotivated at the midpoint in her career.  Anu details how working with a career coach helped her navigate this pressure and find her "true north" by shifting her focus from obsessing about the end result to the quality of the input. This new approach paved the way for her to build Expensify's ops and payments infrastructure, lead the company's IPO, and now direct go-to-market strategy while leveraging AI to drive data-led growth.   🎧 Join the conversation with host, Erica Lockheimer and co-host, Elizabeth Wendorf-Bloesser.