Written for the leaders, owners and professionals of the 11 million businesses with between $50,000 and $50 million in revenue.

Expense reports are an inevitable part of the work world. This can include everything from client lunches, airfare and hotel, WFH office equipment and wellness stipends to an Uber ride home from the office holiday party. But reimbursement procedures, while often necessary for tax reasons and flagging misuse, can range from confusing to agonizing.

A number of startups are trying to change that, according to The New York Times, such as training AI to automatically file expenses from emailed receipts. Even long-established software companies like SAP Concur are inviting feedback on how to reduce friction.

In the meantime, while expense reports might not be anyone’s idea of fun, check out business.com’s guide to Employee Expense Reimbursement.

BroBible: Why the founders bought it back

Atari: Legacy video game brand gets a 1-up

Reflect Orbital: Selling sunshine at night?

(Source: BroBible)

Finding a buyer for your business is the main goal of many entrepreneurs, but what if you disagree with the direction that the buyer takes afterward?

Whether you’re contracted to stick around for years or simply feel an emotional attachment to what you built, you could follow in the footsteps of Michael Dell and Charles Schwab, who both regained control of their companies. So did the founders of millennial sports and culture news brand BroBible.

When Woven Digital (now Uproxx Media) purchased BroBible in the early 2010s, the partnership felt like fitting a square peg into a round hole, according to BroBible publisher Brandon Wenerd. So the bros bought their independence back and rebranded as a content studio for brands such as Ninja, Braun, Red Bull, Gillette, Bose, and Old Spice.

Wenerd told b. how the move allowed them to play to their strengths and steer clear of trendy distractions.

b.: What prompted BroBible’s shift from “dude publication” to marketing agency?

Wenerd: When we started BroBible in 2009, I was 24. The idea of marketing to millennial men who were in college, postgrad, or at the beginning of their careers was not widely embraced by the larger business community. There were channels where those ad spends went, but as the demographic has grown up — millennials now are midcareer — the marketing conversation around this audience has only grown more valuable.

b.: How did BroBible’s transition reshape the company’s strategy? Wenerd: My light bulb moment after we took the brand back was realizing we don’t need a minimum [deal threshold] anymore. We can now work with people on a number of different budgets and sizes. …

Brands are often looking to do cool things … to reach our demographic. [For example] I packed up the new Ninja FrostVault cooler and the Ninja Woodfire grill, loaded them into my Jeep, and went on a 6,500-mile road trip across the United States to some beautiful outdoor spots. …

That’s the kind of project I pride myself on, taking creator-style initiatives and applying them to traditional digital media publishing, giving life to the product, and showing how it fits into a potential customer’s life.

b.: What advice do you have for entrepreneurs facing similar situations?

Wenerd: The way that business and culture work now — compared to 10 or 20 years ago — there is always a shiny object. There’s always the new thing you have to be doing, all these different tentacles your business feels like it needs to have, like a gravitational pull.

You don’t need to necessarily say “no” to all of those things, but you need a framework of thinking that keeps you on track [without] losing sight of who you are and what your vision is. … When TikTok started, people asked, “What’s your TikTok strategy?” We threw a lot of things at the wall with a lot of energy to eventually find our way … and it’s working. …

We’ve taken a number of shots to do the podcasting thing at BroBible because people are like, “Oh, there’s lots of opportunity, blah, blah, blah.” I get it, there is all that opportunity. What we realized was the most valuable thing to come out of podcasting for us is the information that could be contextualized and put in a written format on BroBible where we can serve ads around it, versus the inventory that comes with the podcast.

When it comes to taking care of your employees, you should be doing it with gusto.

And thanks to Gusto’s HR software, you can! It centralizes helpful features, allowing you to manage your payroll and administer employee benefits in one place, as well as track professional development progress and extend your employees the growth opportunities they want. Look to the future, too, with hiring and onboarding tools that make it easy to select the right candidate and grow your team with purpose.

See the difference that a comprehensive HR management software can make in your business, when you sign up for Gusto today.

(Source: Shutterstock)

The great American video game crash of 1983 saw Atari’s market share dip 60 percent virtually overnight. From there, the OG Bay Area tech company — which had dominated the pre-Nintendo Entertainment System market with revolutionary games like Pong and Asteroids — produced failure after failure until it filed for bankruptcy in 2013, bouncing around parent companies, crypto trends, and sketchy licensing deals.

But against all odds, Atari has new life (you could even call it a “1-up”) under turnaround CEO Wade Rosen.

Since 2021, Rosen’s Atari has dropped the gimmicks and focused on actual game publishing — who’da thought? — with a focus on preservation: scooping up development studios that specialize in remastering classic titles (many with documentary-like historical context added) and selling reproduction 1970s consoles and cartridges that are playable on modern equipment. It all added up to over $11 million in revenue last year, which is not a fortune but also not bad for a legacy brand that had been left for dead until recently.

This comes as the medium faces a preservation crisis, with an estimated nine in 10 classic video games unavailable to purchase today. If Atari can make that number go down while revitalizing itself? That’s a win-win.

(Source: Reflect Orbital)

Reflect Orbital wants to sell you solar rays … at nighttime. And they’re planning to do it with a $6.5 million seed funding round from VCs like Sequoia Capital and Starship Ventures. 

The pitch is that a “constellation” of low-orbit Mylar mirrors will reflect daylight to your exact coordinates — via app, naturally — 90 minutes before sunrise or after sunset. It’s not just intended for all-night beach parties, however, as the bonus sunshine could boost solar power generation.

Skepticism is likely warranted. (You can’t always believe your eyes.) Still, a viral video showing off the concept has already netted over 30,000 reservations. That’s going to annoy a lot of neighbors. 

Written by Antonio Ferme and Dan Ketchum.