The company holds to 5 core principles, 4 of which it fails drastically:
- Transparency
- Letting the Best Idea Win
- Solving Problems that Matter
- Building Together
- Bias for Action
Transparency:
Letting the Best Idea Win:
The company's politics and hierarchy are stifling what is otherwise an amazing opportunity. For a sub 300 person company, there is an astonishing amount of middle management. Red flags such as managers with single reports are aplenty across the entire organization. This results in a lot of situations of "highest paid person's opinion", where ideas are indeed heard under the guise of a meritocracy, but are not funded, or if good, are promptly stolen by a manager. There have been several such instances of this.
Letting the Best Idea Win:
There are hackathons at Addepar. There are brainstorms at Addepar. There is even a lot of after-hours idea sharing at Addepar. What there isn't is a meritocracy of ideas. Addepar pays lip service to the ideal of letting the best idea win, but unfortunately, lets politics and office hierarchy stifle the amazingly talented, or the brave risk-takers. Instead of encouraging others to tackle problems with vigor and innovation, we end up playing it safe and stomping out opportunity for change. It's no wonder this company has seen an exodus of talent.
Solve Problems That Matter:
Addepar faces a lot of problems to solve. This is why it is a fascinating place to work. Finance is ripe for the fixing, and the company might just have the talent and opportunity to pull it off. Instead, a blind adherence to hubris often times lead to Addepar teams solving the wrong problems. Instead of tackling a huge, glaringly unscalable problem in our services organizations, Addepar instead overhires, and creates ill-conceived models to appease leadership. Instead of investing in portions of the product that are truly revolutionary, and lapping the competition, the company instead spends cycles on "Fascinating" engineering challenges, or an ill-contrived "try this process from a book" flavors of the week. Often - the root cause of organizational issues is lackadaisically monkey patched by a spur of the moment model, process, and this unfortunately underscores the lack of critical thinking within the middle management of Addepar.
Bias for Action:
Addepar certainly gets a lot done. However, there is enough inertia on process and thumb-twiddling that makes it incredulously hard to get things done. Often, too much time is spent on analysis-paralysis in a well-intentioned, but poorly executed ideal of being data driven. The spirit of execution and learning, long a hallmark of "silicon valley" is quickly dying at Addepar, and I fear for it's future. Yes risk must be mitigated. Yes we must optimize ROI. I fear however, we do not take into account the opportunity cost of sitting pat and iterating on mediocrity.
Building Together:
There are issues at every company, but Addepar possesses an amazing amount of talent, and friendly individuals to boot. If any company will "fix finance", it will be this one. I implore leadership to take a good hard look at the opportunity it faces, and to seize it with vigor.
