Fastly reviews

Leadership The board handed the reins to a first-time CEO who has run the company into the ground. Almost the entire C-suite has turned over since Nightingale came in. He has replaced them with exclusively ex-Cisco hires, which has become a comedy of errors. They have been wholly incompetent. They don’t understand the market opportunities/threats and have grossly mismanaged the organization. VP/Directors are as others have described… largely hangers-on. There are a lot of platitudes about ‘empowerment’ but no one is empowered to make change, it's just talk. It is a stagnant organization and its business prospects reflect that. Product: The company struggles to create and market licensable software so the product suite is significantly behind the market and now rarely wins competitive evaluations. It's now a rarity that Fastly is even invited into evaluations. In a mature market, there are few companies that do not have an existing solution in place, so new business requires displacing incumbents. Fastly is poorly positioned to displace incumbents because it can only replace a portion of the competitor’s functionality - the market knows this. Rather than build products that meet current and future client requirements, the executive strategy is to double down on their CDN offering. The challenge is that the CDN market is a commoditized, low growth, and low margin business. Every dollar that is competed over gains $0.75 for the winner, and CDN deals are barely profitable. The entire market is going through price compression and getting eaten by the hyperscalers. It's a terrible market category and they don’t have a pivot. (probably one reason no buyer has emerged for the company). In the past year, two competitors in the CDN space have filed for bankruptcy, Fastly can’t seem to see the writing on the wall. It has been a parade of do-nothings leading the product org. The security platform they acquired for $775M (cash/equity) is basically an afterthought since there is almost no one left. After declaring that “Fastly is a security company”, they are still working on integrating the two systems 4 years later! They’ve missed so many opportunities to innovate in the security space, but they’ve failed because there is no real executive support for the security team, no comprehensive product strategy, and scant resources dedicated to security. It's a shame because it was a solid product. The edge computing solution is a complete failure - no market traction whatsoever and it is pushed as the future of Fastly. The latest “AI-accelerator” will be amazing if it even bills $50 annually for the company. The sustainability dashboard is a reflection of how misguided this company is. Operations Fastly’s internal operations are ridiculous for a public company. Post layoff, it is a tire fire. Processes are engineered with choke points/unnecessary approvals everywhere so it takes forever to get anything accomplished, if at all. Slack is the default communication so internal comms are a maze of loose threads leading to no resolution. Culture There is a culture of mediocrity that permeates the entire organization. Winning is not the culture at Fastly. Accountability is not the culture at Fastly. If you like woke politics bleeding into the workplace, this is the right fit.. Sales Focus New comp plans in ‘24 were designed to drastically limit what salespeople earn. Of note: - Recategorized revenue into buckets w/different rates (all low by ind standards). Rates for new revenue from existing customers (ie enterprise sales) are incredibly low. There are reps who brought in seven figure deals and were paid low four-figure commissions (and then let go during layoff). - Targets for existing customer revenue are often > 3X the company's growth rate. (Ie reps are expected to grow accounts by huge margins with no new products/services). Targets for new logos are often > 8X previous year in order to hit the same OTE. - If a customer churns, new revenue is counted against that deficit (Put that in perspective of a product/company that is getting destroyed by competitors, reps never get out of that hole.) - Commissions paid in monthly increments. - Payouts are based on when the company bills. Billing dept is manual and unorganized, so oftentimes billing will not go out for months and almost impossible to verify for accuracy. - Quotas change twice per year, so payouts can be washed away based on new quota/territory revenue changes. - Reps are not protected financially for deals run through the channel. Instead, partner margin is forfeited by the rep. The result is a total collapse in the revenue org and it is 100% on Nightingale and his team. In reality, this was a program to avoid paying the entire sales organization. Fastly’s marketing is completely ineffective - very few leads, no brand awareness, and the CMO’s strategic emphasis on banner ad campaigns is puzzling. The sales org relied on the channel for new business acquisition. The CEO didn’t like paying the channel org, so he reorganized that team into a model that reduced their effectiveness in the field. The result is that the channel is now largely non-existent.

- Couldn't tell you what more than 90% of the company does all day - New CEO, hard to explain but if you have met him you get it - Nepotism runs thick, it is as bad as it gets - Company all-hands are possibly the most awkward things I've ever watched - Execs swerving employee Q&As with non answers and awkward posturing - Multiple HR complaints regarding sexism or racism and no action is taken - Zero performance management framework, bad employees stay forever - Promotions every year for the same people, to the point that it is comical - Juggling of internal tools without ever fully implementing the ones we do have - Return to office. No data on why. Just do it. This is apparently the focus of a company with a suffering stock price - Hiring restricted to very few locations, could barely fill a req to begin with prior