Bakkt reviews

If you are considering leaving your current job for a position at Bakkt, BEWARE. You will regret your decision. Bakkt has gone downhill at a rapid pace. 1. The number of departures at varying levels of the organization should be a BIG RED FLAG that this place is terrible. Several C-level departures, dozens of Managers, Directors, Department VPs, and dozens of individual contributors. I have never seen anything like it. For months, the executive team told everyone that “attrition is normal when a company goes public” and “it is business, people come and go. It is natural”. They said those things for as long as they could before the departures continued to get worse, and then they stopped addressing it in the all hands meetings 2. The executive team is clueless. All of the executives are friends or former colleagues of the CEO. They were put into their positions and are not qualified to run an organization as evidenced by the poor decision making 3. The executive team is dishonest on multiple fronts a. They blatantly lie to clients about EVERYTHING. On a call with a client, the executives tell their clients that they are invested in their business, they are their top priority. On internal calls, the CEO said in an all hands meeting that he wants to get clients he actually wants, not the clients he inherited from previous leadership. He and the rest of the executives also regularly tell the team that we need to control the client and show them who is in control here, even though performance with the clients has been terrible for months consecutively b. The number of departures has gotten so bad that they now try to hide it from clients. The executive team released direction to say that we are no longer allowed to communicate any attrition to clients, because clients are getting concerned. When people in heavy client interaction roles resign, they try to have them NOT say anything to clients before their departure, so that the executive team can make up reasons about why the employee left. It has happened multiple times 4. For the first year and a half of Bakkt coming in, all they shouted about was the app, the app, the app. After lying to the company for over a year about the performance of the app, they finally changed their tune 5. They are bringing in waves of new leaders to replace everyone who has left. They are telling all of the incoming leaders that the previous executive team were a bunch of idiots and that’s why the business is failing. But the business started to fail when the CEO and his friends took over and started making decisions 6. To try to save employees (because everyone was/is leaving) they offered a BS retention bonus to select employees, but you had to stay for two years to get it and if you left anytime before then, you would have to pay the first installment back, but you wouldn’t even get the first installment until one year in. They tried to swing this as a recognition bonus for everyone’s hard work. LOL. 7. No one in the company got a performance evaluation. Instead, we all got a flat 10% raise – again, another tactic to retain people. This is great when you consider the average annual raise is less than 10%, but it sucks when you know that everyone in the company got the same increase including people who hardly work versus those who work 12 hour days. It shows that everyone is valued the same. The communication was also poor as it was released in a companywide email, not communicated by managers 8. We are constantly being asked to lie to or manipulate clients to hide how bad things are internally 9. The HR team collects feedback from key people who leave, but they do nothing with it. The HR leaders acknowledge how bad it is, but they don’t take action. It is almost as if the HR leaders are scared to go against the CEO 10. They talk so badly about really good people who have left the company. Instead of recognizing that they have really big problems and fixing them, they spend their time bashing the very people they tried to beg to stay. Once someone denies their request to stay, they become enemy #1 and their name is run through the mud. This has happened with several people and as recent as TODAY, they are still doing it 11. The all hands meetings are a JOKE. When anyone asks difficult questions about the mass departures or the leveling exercise or pay increases, the question is met with attitude and a fluff answer is given Joining Bakkt was the worst mistake I ever made. I hope I can stop you from doing the same.

* No Goal: For instance the company is not sure what type of company this is. Crypto? Loyalty? Trading? Payment? They have no idea. The agenda changes every all hands meeting (Actually, it is a all hands show) * Tough on hiring: For hiring a Jr. resource you will have to wait for next Gavin's/Board Meeting approval. As a policy there is no joining Bonus. We where loosing a lot of good potential hires just for this. * No Ownership: No one care to improve anything. All they want is lights on mode. No one cares to work in improving the product and providing customer value. All they say, "Let customer start using then once we have revenue flow we will improve". * All hands Meeting: I definitely wanted to talk about the All Hands Meeting. This is one BIG waste of company time. Initially they were meeting every Friday till they went Public. After that the frequency was made to once in 2 weeks. All they do is Gavin propaganda in this meeting. All speakers in the meeting also talk as if Gavin moved the mountains. In reality, they change the company focus in every meeting, one meeting they boast themselves as Bitcoin company, Then they will remember an acquired group of people and say they are expanding on Loyalty they they will start speaking about payment solutions. The worst part is they will start as if there is nothing on fire. * Trust: I will have to say this, there is no trust from the employees towards the management and vice versa. Key founding members left the company immediately after company went public. CTO also left sooner. The technology company does not have a CTO. Team members leave every week. We lost some very important team members because of the way they were treated by the leaders. Very strange I have seen various HR contacts in a short span of time. When I send mail to a HR for something and next time when I had to talk to HR for something else the mailbox bounces. They left! * No transparency: The leadership always say they conduct all hand meeting and are a very transparent org. But in reality, the leadership would say something one day and the agenda would change immediately and will never bring the old topic. No one will know what happened to the old topic. * Org Leveling: Leveling was some big time joke. All Gavin's friends were graded higher and anyone not in good terms with Gavin was leveled lower. I know some good members left our team as they were not leveled correctly. * Diversity & Inclusion: This is something everyone should know. The color of the skin play a key role in influencing leadership. The thing is it cannot be spotted easily but with a closer look you will be able to make it out. This company for some reason does not hire immigrants even for desperate positions that are open for months.