From Unicorn to Corporate Cautionary Tale - Anonymous employee ezCater Employee Review

Let me paint you a picture of what it feels like to watch something you genuinely loved get dismantled piece by piece, decision by decision, until one day you show up to work, metaphorically, since we're remote, for now, and realize the place you loved simply doesn't exist anymore. That's ezCater. And if you're considering joining, or you're a customer wondering why things feel different, here's the honest account nobody in leadership wants you to read. It was really something special once. The kind of company people bragged about working at, for the culture, the people, the energy. A genuine unicorn startup where your ideas actually mattered and diversity wasn't a slide in a deck, it was just the reality. That version of ezCater existed under Stefania, the founder. When she stepped down, a clock started ticking, and we just didn't know it yet. Then came Ashwin. Brought in from Lyft, zero CEO experience, zero startup experience, but plenty of friends he wanted nearby. One by one, people who had built this place started disappearing, replaced by familiar faces from his network. When the internal feedback scores hit historic lows, Ashwin eventually left. And we exhaled. Too soon, as it turned out, because every single person he'd surrounded himself with stayed, brushing it off like the numbers were a minor inconvenience rather than a company-wide cry for help. Recently they hired Shalia into the COO role at the end of what they called an exhaustive search, a search that somehow ended with another Lyft connection. Funny how that works. Now Nihad, the former CFO, sits in the CEO chair. A banking guy running a tech startup. That transition tells you everything about what the priority is now. We are not people to this leadership. We are line items, costs to be reduced so that investors, who have been waiting years for their exit, can finally see the return they came for. Take the PTO situation, because it genuinely needs to be documented as a case study in corporate gaslighting. We had real unlimited PTO. Then it became "unlimited" with fine print, restrictions, time windows, invisible limits. Then they renamed it "flexible" PTO, which was just more restrictions wearing a friendlier label. Now it's fully capped, barely distinguishable from any old-school corporate policy, except with the added insult that how much of it you actually use will affect your annual raise. The raises deserve their own paragraph because what happened in 2025 was genuinely brazen. Leadership conducted a "market assessment" to suppress compensation for new hires and existing employees alike. Then, less than a month before raises were issued, they quietly rolled out new performance rules that cut raises significantly for a large portion of the company. Not introduced in 2025 to take effect in 2026, that would have been fair, and fair isn't the operating principle here. Applied immediately, retroactively, right before the checks were cut. Many employees received raises that were effectively nonexistent. All of this while the company's revenue has grown sixfold. The money is there. It's just not flowing in our direction. The annual company meeting, honestly, watching that slowly die has felt like its own kind of grief. A full week in Boston became four days, then three, then two, and now one single day plus two travel days. They stopped holding it in Boston, no vote, no discussion. Not Denver, our second biggest office. Not San Francisco or New York. An old casino in Minneapolis. This year, Saint Louis. The reason isn't cultural, it's financial, and spending money on employees is no longer part of the vision. What stings most is the silencing. We used to be able to speak. Ideas got heard, feedback shaped decisions. That's gone. An expensive external consultancy evaluated every department, led to more layoffs, and survivors were told how incredibly lucky they were to still have jobs, then had their workloads tripled and started getting tracked more closely. The new feedback system now pops up a warning that your name might be shared with whoever you're reviewing. Anonymous feedback, dead. When employees used Slack to share how they were feeling on the way out, the company deleted the messages. Like those people never existed. The one perk that had survived all of this, full remote work, is now being challenged with mandatory in-person requirements. They now state openly that if we don't like it, we can look somewhere else to work. The special recipe that this company had is not coming back under this leadership. Outsourcing is accelerating, autonomy is shrinking, and the feedback mechanisms that might have created accountability have been systematically dismantled. If you're a customer who feels like something is off about ezCater lately, you're not imagining it. It's the same thing we feel from the inside. The new slogan should be: Reduce cost, sacrifice culture, maximize profits for investors to exit. This is corporate greed, and it killed ezCater.