Self worth obliterated. Feel like a row on a spreadsheet that was literally just a part of a cost benefit analysis model (powered by datarobot?!?!?!) that said I wasn't worth it and my physical & mental well-being, financial stability, and livelihood aren't more important than making sure the company can still have sexy stock in a few years. Did what they said, 80 hour weeks, worked hard, made genuine friendships with my colleagues, and more. All it got me was getting a pinkslip during one of the worst crises in modern history.
Just red flags all over from the start when all employees have to sign an nda about pay so no one really knows if they're getting paid fairly for the amount of work they're asked to do and the number of hours required to be valued by the CEO.
*CEO cares more about the stocks of the company than the humans who worked for him*
Despite being the primary person responsible for the complete train wreck that has transpired at this company. money isn't real and we can burn it in the dumpsters was essentially his strategy for many years. By being the sole authority on nearly every single decision and bottlenecking the company, his impulsiveness and need to try and innovate resulted in constant turnover on projects, people, investments, etc. Making matters more frustrating is he believed he was some sort of Willy Wonka and would make outrageous claims about how great things were going, all the things he would provide employees, how he wasn't a CEO who would ever let boards and investors priorities impact us, etc. and it was all a sham. He cut people off in the middle of a pandemic to keep the business going while also being one of the companies helping the government and healthcare companies predict just how bad this disaster will be. Complete lack of a moral compass. One of those guys who is so concerned with not being labelled politically correct that he doesn't realize how bad he is at treating employees with basic human decency.
*no visibility into the business performance or health*
They never gave anyone any actual insight besides that we were allegedly doing incredibly well and just had an amazing year! This makes it even harder to believe the virus was the reason for the cuts as it would mean they burned 220 mill from the fall and that the amazing year last year couldn't even help. Much more likely the CEOs constant quick pivots, immature decision making and lack of foresight led to being cash strapped which we all knew because they told us reducing spend was an initiative for all of us to take part of earlier this year. They also hired a new CRO in the fall who got people excited about the direction and then they got into a fight with the CEO and got ousted on a whim which led to months of stalled progress.
*their employee improvement program is a sham and more of a cult dedicated to the company and CEO than actually being helpful*
"dream big" is snake oil sales. they bring you in and basically say they will provide you resources to "10x" your life and make promises that they cannot keep (school, training, health programs, etc.) while telling you in return you need to work 80-100 hours for datarobot a week because the only reason you don't is you're a fool who is bad at time management. despite being well intention-ed, people burn out because they get excited to change their lives and then just like everything else at the company, the resources are slow to get approved, you become overworked, and constantly feel like you're not doing enough because god forbid you want to be someone who spends less than 50 hours a week on datarobot.
*100 domains*
Absolutely moronic. they tried to break the company down into 100 mini companies. this is just lines of business and teams with a new name so it wouldn't even have been that innovative if they had executed properly. but what they caused was 0 visibility into who was responsible for what, competition for internal resources, no mobility of people between "domains," duplicated effort on everything, and 100 groups bottlenecked because they all had to get the CEOs approval on nearly everything and because they would potentially have to pivot on months worth of work on a dime because of the constant changing of GTM plans.
There was also terrible communications from the executives in general and it was hard to know who to go for for literally anything.
*dysfunctional people ops and HR*
The People Ops was the most poorly run group at the company. Unfortunately this caused Hr in a spot that left them incapable of following up with basic tasks, providing no system or guidelines on how to handle feedback on leadership, and no system in place to track employee performance and KPI tracking leaving many who worked long, hard hours with no idea where they stood at the company or whether they were valued.
They also failed to pay bonuses on time multiple times and explained it off as system errors or something.
people ops was unapproachable about any feedback or criticism no matter how legitimate and it felt as if telling peopleops anything would mean you'd be seen as a dissenter. no empathy for anyone and often would side with managers over employees. Also sent an embarrassing packet on helping people get new jobs that looked like it took 10 minutes of copying And pasting from google.
*dehumanizing work environment with little to show for many people who tried to buy in*
The CEO openly talks about viewing humans as software who have bugs and need patches in order to operate more efficiently. This is dumb and an example of one of the many things he would say he thinks are innovative but in practice he means he wanted to be able to figure out how to get the absolute most hours and output of every employee for the company, even when that meant the product, content, processes, people and business suffered from drops in quality, innovation, etc. because everyone was burned out.
The CEO is obsessed with Masayoshi and Elon and the culture reflects someone with those types of role models. He openly talked about how he valued people who stayed later and worked longer hours more than those who didn't, despite trying to back track on it occasionally.
There was also a large usage of public shaming in order to try and make people better (??) that tapered off towards the end as the company grew but there were multiple occasions at company wide meetings that were outright uncomfortable for many in the audience who felt it was unnecessarily harsh, not the right time and place, and the CEO just taking a chance to sling insults thinly disguised as criticism. People are terrified that the slightest mistsakes will lead to them being reamed out by the CEO or other terrible leaders that don't understand that "bad communication skills" can only be an excuse for bad leadership and feedback delivery when people actually try to make changes or there is acknowledgement of flaws (to his credit, someone on the board or one of his coaches probably told him people thought he was a jerk and he started to tone it down).
*Flawed core values leads to flawed leadership and terrible business decisions*
the ceo openly liked people who stayed longer hours but this led to a culture of promoting people who were not the right people to lead or who were just outright bad at their job being in leadership roles no matter how bad of an impact on employees. they also never faced repercussions for failures.
the ceo claims feedback is a gift and yet any feedback that's negative about him or his inner crew is seen as being a "red vector" who isn't aligned. people were sounding alarms across the business that there were major issues that would be catastrophic but the CEOs need to keep going at 100000000 mph and only listening to his inner crew led to none of them being addressed and ultimately the company not being able to support people in their times of need.
*data company, no data*
no insight into business functions, how to improve them, how to not spend 220 million dollars, and instead ten thousand meaningless chart.io dashboards no one wants use because the metrics are worthless
*laughing stock of the company was demand generation despite having amazing marketing and sdr talent*
Leadership in demand gen convinced themselves they were going to be in a business journal one day for building an innovative lead pipeline and SDR program and ended up squandering one of the biggest opportunities in modern history for a company. People would join the company and be appalled at how bad the CRM data quality was because of the ridiculous process that no one liked and they over engineered every process in the "lead pipeline" that left SDRs to be data police and Salesforce janitors that didn't even get to learn about the product or any sales skills. It was unclear why the SDR and demand gen function were so linked and why they refused to listen to anyone from sales or marketing about the drastic need for at least some pragmatic approaches. In the end though, the Leaders who were responsible for this embarrassment were moved to the CEOs special team right before they fired a decent amount of SDRs and marketing directors which is about as exemplary of what to expect from this company as you can get. Making it worse is management was chosen to be people who weren’t capable of making a difference to change and who would rather talk about themselves and none of the sdrs felt as if anyone had their backs. They failed to develop more than an on boarding program and instead focused on teaching the sdrs data process that was redundant and learning one of the leaders in degens cringeworthy retelling of deals they won years ago that are no longer relevant
*customer success Group held back with fragile egos and short tempers at the top*
