Cofounders have not worked anywhere else - this doesn't mean Lambda is their first job as a C-level exec. It is their first job. Period. Under normal circumstances, that would be acceptable if they were open minded and welcome to feedback and constructive criticism. However, this is far from the case. A prior review stated that almost the entire product team was let go the day the CEO came back from parental leave. This is true, with the addition of almost the entire indirect sales team, leaving millions of dollars in the pipeline untouched and without followup for the remainder of 2022. An irresponsible amount of revenue was left on the table. Not only was this organizational decision made in a vacuum, (and HR was unaware of the firings until afterwards), but there was no acknowledgement of the mistake in further all-hands meetings. We all heard through the grapevine that "The CEO acknowledges that he made a mistake in the way this was executed” but we never heard him say that explicitly. So how was the rest of the team expected to trust him, or the rest of the leadership team moving forward? From that day forward, any sense of psychological safety went out the window. This lack of knowledge around how to lead a company reflects in the culture. For example: The CEO runs a weekly all-hands meeting where many times, he will show up without anything prepared. No agenda, no presentation, just 30 minutes of him trying to fill the time, awkwardly pulling "company updates" out of nowhere. To me, this communicated a lack of respect for everyone’s time, and set the example that meeting preparation does not matter. I left these meetings feeling frustrated that my time wasn’t being valued, and confused as to how we were going to “make it” as a startup if we couldn’t take our own meetings seriously. Culture of micromanagement: The micromanagement comes from a place of hiring inexperienced managers, who aren’t given the appropriate tools to enable a high-performing team. My personal experience (and I was considered “senior” in my individual contributing role) was that my manager would sit in on meetings with me, as a “silent attendee” - clearly came from a lack of trust. This “babysitting” took away from my perceived credibility, and I had several conversations with them asking what would give them confidence to let me fly on my own? They acknowledged it was unreasonable to babysit me, and shared that they would back off. But then would follow up, scrutinizing every little detail of my emails to external parties, internal team members, I got slacked about once every 3 hours asking for an update on something that was a 3-month long deliverable. The few performance reviews I had were always landing me between “meets” and “exceeds” expectations, so I was confused about the micromanagement, and felt like we couldn’t have strategic discussions in our one on ones, nor could I exercise my critical thinking skills with this level of micromanagement. Beyond all of this, there was one C-level exec who is by far the worst individual I’ve ever crossed paths with professionally. They were toxic, conniving, and a negative leader with unrealistic expectations of their collaborators. Many people had issues dealing with this individual, yet all of our concerns were overlooked by the CEO due to the fact that they were a different personality to the people who “mattered,” and met their deliverables.
