Micromanagement Starts at the Top - Anonymous employee Rokt Employee Review

2.0
Feb 24, 2017
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

ROKT's best strength is it's fun, vibrant, young, party hard culture. You will love spending time with your coworkers from around the globe, making memories with them in exotic locales (lHawaii!). This is 5% of the job.

Cons

The other 95% of the time you will be part of an organisation run by one man's whims, the CEO Bruce. Whatever your title is, no matter your role, the CEO will determine what you work on and when. You may be a subject matter expert in marketing, but what Bruce wants is the only thing that matters. It trickles down from your manager's manager and you are left holding the bag, trying to fulfill whatever demand the CEO had in mind that day. The other challenge is you're forced to promote a product that really only works in Australia. The smoke and mirrors of the marketing tech and advertising tech spaces is very evident here. Lots of smoke, and not a lot of substance. We have a small group of customers we've bent over backwards for and provide some success for, but this is not a scalable or long term growth company. The fact we've been around for 6 years and haven't grown at the pace most successful startups do, is a testament to how small the market fit is for our product.

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Rokt Response
9y
Firstly, thank you for providing us with this feedback - we value feedback as it helps build a better ROKT! As with most startups, we have been heavily dependent on a small leadership team, to help navigate our growth as we have expanded globally from an initial base only in Australia. Hands-on leadership, and the disciplined application of business expertise are key ingredients of our success, where we continue to see strong results and work hard for every opportunity. Over the last 12 months we've also hired more than 20 industry leaders across all of our departments, to provide our teams in each market with the experienced people managers to provide better training and coaching for everyone. We are definitely not perfect and some of our managers have not provided the level of support we want to see for every team, but we are quick to react and fix issues. I am sorry you got the impression from your manager that all decisions on what you were doing day-to-day are made by Bruce our CEO, but this is simply not correct. Bruce has built a number of very large and successful business by building strong teams - as he is doing at ROKT - we have a leadership team that includes 20 of our people leaders and an executive team that are not only responsible for their respective teams but also the overall strategy and direction of the entire business. Some of the statements you make are not factually correct: - We are growing at triple digit rates and regularly hit new records - This is one of the reasons we successfully closed out our Series B capital round over the last month - 60% of our business is now based in the US, Australia is only 20% of our current business - We now have successful businesses in Australia, USA, New Zealand, Canada, UK and Singapore - this year we will rollout a number of new markets - We have over 2000 clients successfully using our platform and achieving great results - ROKT has been going for just over 4 years in its current form. We are doubtful, based on the above (and international spelling from someone claiming to be from our New York office), that this is genuine review from an actual New York team member, but nonetheless we have responded to each of your points.

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Pros

Great company, lots of freedom and breadth of work

Cons

Very fast paced, too fast for some people.

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Pros

Rokt is the kind of place where you can grow fast if you're willing to put in the work. I've built my way up to senior leadership over my time here, that kind of trajectory doesn't happen without real investment from the company in its people. The work is genuinely complex and interesting: you're sitting at the intersection of technology, commercial strategy, and some of the biggest brands in the world. The caliber of teammates has been consistently high, and the culture pushes you to think bigger and challenge yourself. There's also a real emphasis on building leaders from within, which I've benefited from directly and tried to pay forward with my own team.

Cons

Fast growth means things move quickly and priorities can shift. If you need a lot of structure or predictability, it can feel like a lot. Ambiguity is part of the job, and not everyone thrives in that environment.

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