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Thanks again for leaving this feedback. I know it's been left a few times, so I'm not sure why it keeps getting re-posted (a Glassdoor issue?). Regardless, I appreciate you making the effort to share your feedback and thoughts with us. I want to acknowledge that it's not easy as a leader to get everything right, especially when a company is growing very quickly as the same time. I really value your feedback, and I hope you can see that we're making real strides in improving some of the areas you've identified as areas of weakness earlier this year. I think there are some areas I disagree with you on, and other areas that I think you are absolutely right in pointing out. I'll address these below:
1. As you pointed out, I care deeply about gender equality. We've had women on our board of directors from day 1 (our first four lead investors were women). 50% of our Directors and Managers are women, 50% of our employees are women, and 50% of our top-ten earners in the company are women. We recently did an audit to evaluate gender pay gap and found that women actually made slightly more than men at Cotopaxi, but this was likely due to women having a slightly longer average tenure than men. I also serve on the board of two amazing nonprofits that support girls and women (one in New York and one in Utah). Some of my greatest mentors are women, who you had a chance to interact with at the office a number of times. I don't claim we have a perfect organization, but to call us a male-dominated and sexist work environment is unfair. Our data and actions speak loudly here.
2. Regarding the "big bucks" comment, this is a tough one for me to understand. I pay others in the organization more than I pay myself. Many of us on the senior leadership team took pay cuts to join Cotopaxi. Nobody at Cotopaxi is here for the money, we're here because we believe in our mission and we want to work with others that feel the same way. Our "do good" mission is "THE WHY" behind everything we do. I think that's pretty clear in how the organization is run - we've donated 100% of our profits and more to charity since our inception five years ago.
3. Benefits - I agree that we don't have the best benefits of any startup. There's no indoor basketball court, nor tons of free meals, etc. We do however offer 10% In The Wild Time (10% of your work week can be spent volunteering or exploring outdoors). We have unlimited vacation and we pay for a bucket list trip after 18 months with us. We do fun off sites as a team every quarter (we did this in our early years, and have recently starting kicking off these events again). That said, we don't have a 401k implemented as of September 2019. However, we'll have one in place shortly that takes effect on January 1, 2020. As most startups, we used equity to compensate in the first years of the business instead of a 401k (which you participated in and will benefit from).
4. HR - You're absolutely right that this is a huge need of ours. This month (September 2019) we're bringing on an amazing HR resource for our team. Last year we began exploring what other companies are doing for HR and we got feedback that most companies don't hire a full-time HR employee until they reach 100 team members. This seemed to make a lot of sense, so we made that our plan. What we've seen over the last year is that given our culture and mission, our employees expect more out of us than a typical organization, and frankly, we want this to be a place that cares more than a typical organization. We have a senior HR executive that will begin working at Cotopaxi in a part-time capacity (we have 53 full-time employees, so we'll add him or someone else full-time as our team grows). This individual was previously the head of people and talent at a large outdoor retailer and at one of the biggest US airlines. We're excited about this change, and look forward to how we can tackle some big strategic issues together (including compensation, promotion, on and off boarding, people strategy, etc.).
Again, thank you for taking the time to share feedback. I know it's done in the spirit of making us better.
- Davis Smith, CEO
