Pros
-Overall great people that care about each other. Many of the work friends I have made throughout my career came from my time at Pure. All ages, all ethnicities across the globe! -Experienced CEO: Charlie is a very nice man who has a three decade pedigree of senior leadership in enterprise tech. He listens, cares about his employees and is truly doing what he can do to make Pure a top notch employer. Wish he was empowered by the Board to do more. -Swag: Pure spends oodles of $$$ on employees, customer and partner apparel and graciously hands it out at minimal to no cost. And this isn’t the cheap zip up sweaters...I’m talking Patagonia, Nike and other top brand names.
Cons
In my opinion, Pure is having serious challenges when it comes to scaling their organization beyond 3k employees. I broke this down into 3 main categories, but basically in summary middle management is the achilles heel of Pure. Fix your middle Mgt issues and you’ve got a real shot to become an iconic tech company. 3 Impediments to Progress: all interconnected - no hierarchy of importance. 1) GTM Leadership 2) Product Strategy 3) Diversity & Inclusion GTM Leadership - To be candid, Pure’s Sales Leadership is rife with nepotism, favoritism and lack of clearly defined organization structure and accountability. 1) Field Sales overhiring hiring practices to compensate for low % of plan to participation of field reps. Throw more reps at a productivity issue? That’s their strategy ... 2) Sales Enablement/Ops- Leaders more concerned with image and self promotion than empowering sales(across all levels) to produce higher levels of consistent output QvQ. Furthermore, the leaders of both orgs do not empower their individual managers to make key decisions , rather they accept company awards and show up in company training videos all to promote his/her own brands. Unprofessional and needs oversight. 3) Inside Sales: I think other reviews pretty much summed it up: ISO is a broken cluster of mismanagement: 3 Global VPs in less than four years and misalignment with field leaders = limited appreciation/respect for ISO. Product Strategy 1) Pure did not embrace the public /hybrid movement until market dynamics forced them to. Way back in 2015-2016, Pure was still preaching that public cloud was not part of the business plan. Fortunately, Charlie has pushed CTO/Founder to embrace a more SaaS/services business model, but similar to Nutanix it’ll take the public markets awhile to adopt the “new Pure”. 3) Diversity & Inclusion: This one hurts the most. Why? Because the #1 differentiation Pure has over its competition are the employees...the people. You would think a company full of scrappy people would embrace , encourage and seek out a diverse workforce. But instead, Pure Leadership has built up “employees resource groups or ERGs”- which serve as a conduit to showing external financial stakeholders that Pure is trying to address its D&I challenges. But like many tech companies, Pure has failed to truly achieve diversity and show inclusion in all the critical areas that are important to company growth: Leadership composition at all levels (mostly white males), non mandated employee reviews, no diversity hiring panel for key exec roles and no real $$ or action behind diversity efforts. Having a “part time D&I consultant” talk outdated ideals to make Pure more diverse/inclusive isn’t gonna cut it for the young female engineer looking for a shot in a male dominated org or the experienced black Sales VP who has a resume that moves mountains vs his white counterpart but isn’t connected well enough for Pure’s Sales Leadership to hire him. Q: If that person is good enough to become a Global VP at NetApp then why not Pure? Something to ponder...
