A Deeply Troubled Company Masquerading as a "Unicorn" - Sales Executive Dragos Employee Review

6/7/2024 Update - Dragos HR is reporting negative reviews on this site saying that they violate Glassdoor’s Community Guidelines. They got this review and another popular one both removed. This review was cited for “mentioning an employee by name” so I will mention him as “CEO” only. I am a shareholder in Dragos and will not be muzzled. I will continue to keep editing this review as necessary to put the truth out there about this deeply troubled company so that the Board can take action to address it and so prospective employees can make an informed decision as to whether they want to work there. Below is my original review. Dragos has been one of the worst experiences in my professional career. Run by an early-30-something technocrat “celebrity” CEO who is a ICS/OT expert but a total novice at business, the CEO is simply in way over his head. Dragos has gotten bigger than he ever probably imagined and now he’s struggling with leading a big-time business. More focused on canoodling with oligarchs at Davos and testifying in front of Congress than running his company, the CEO laid off another 10% of the company in March from his luxury suite at an expensive Las Vegas hotel while attending S4. He is bizarrely transparent about his personal life and often drinks in meetings. At a company-wide meeting a few months ago, he told the entire company that he got checked out by a doctor in order to prove to everyone that he’s not an alcoholic. (He later quipped, “I’ll keep my wine off camera from now on.”) He talks openly in all-hands meetings about his personal life, including his marital issues. He often seems unhinged, and frequently shares his flawed thoughts and judgments in a real-time stream-of-consciousness to the entire company. The CEO supposedly makes “data driven decisions” but as of March, is “just gaining insights” into “important IPO benchmarks” he should have known years ago, like his R&D spend versus revenue. He has also proven to be rather bad at hiring leadership, and the executive and senior leadership teams are a constantly rotating cast of characters. Unfortunately, mounting management mistakes like these have led to two rounds of layoffs in the last 12 months, with almost 20% of the company being let go in that time. The CFO is equally overmatched, allowing the company to become over-leveraged against VCs while not yet reaching profitability. (Did I mention they’re going to be raising another round?) Dragos has taken almost $500m from VCs with no exit in sight and their overinflated $1.4b valuation in 2021 is a distant memory. Executive leadership is clueless, siloed, and disconnected from what’s happening across the organization. It’s common to duplicate roles and then conduct “reorganizations” to correct later. Corporate jargon like “The 5 Keys to Winning” and “The Dragos Core Values,” seem to exist only as an excuse for constant restructuring. While transparency in the CEO's personal matters is awkwardly high, there is little real transparency from him about the business. He shares half-truths that are just juicy enough to satiate employees, but that do not reflect the real challenges of the company. The CEO cannot clearly articulate the business strategy and is a micromanager who easily gets himself in the weeds. Even the ELT/SLT often have no idea what the real strategy is. Instead, senior leadership is mostly focused on firefighting daily tactical issues, not planning for longer term goals and objectives. Sole contributors are often rudderless, trying to do more work with less resources while receiving little tangible guidance from leadership and having badly needed positions cut from the budget. Dragos was a rocket ship until early 2022 but now the fuel has run out and the ship is falling back to Earth. As the economy has slowed, customers in the ICS Security space have struggled to find funding for expensive, cumbersome, hardware-based platforms like Dragos. Sales repeatedly fails to meet goals while individual salespeople bring on the wrong kind of customers just to hit their personal quotas. The last CRO hire was a total disaster as he only lasted 18 months, and during that time he ran an otherwise productive sales team into the ground. He arrived promising 100% YOY growth but missed his first quarter so badly that he had to re-forecast the entire year’s numbers. He then failed to meet his re-forecasted sales goals and was abruptly “asked to transition out.” The replacement CRO came in and immediately exploited the CEO’s naïveté by convincing the CEO that the Customer Success, Engineering, Product Management and Support all needed to be under Sales and report directly to him. Although Sales failed the organization for over two years, and during that time Customer Success kept churn in the low single digits, it was CS that had to pay the price, and in March the organization was gutted in yet another “strategic restructuring” that laid off 10% more of the company. Per Glassdoor's policies, I cannot list the titles of the roles eliminated, but the cuts extended all the way to the top leadership of the CS group. If it happens, IPO is still probably 3-5 years away, mostly because the company cannot figure out how to get out of its own way and execute its G2M strategy. I can’t see a world in which the share price at IPO, let alone six months later when you can sell your shares, is anywhere close to earlier expectations. The strike price of options is very high by comparison, making them worth little in end compensation, and a big gamble to buy if you leave the company. (Yes, you can lose money on stock options.) Dragos was once a promising company when money was free flowing and mistakes could be fixed by hiring someone or otherwise throwing VC money at it, but the reduction in venture capital, missed sales goals, failed leadership, and budget cuts at customers have punched the company in the mouth. The CEO is fully responsible for the value of the company dropping by half in the last 18 months, and it's still dropping further. The company is reeling and while it will most likely recover to fight another day, leadership has a lot to figure out and not much time left to do it as investor and Board pressure on the CEO is rising after these repeated failures.