Percolata Corporation reviews

The CEO is outright crazy. Low wages. Extremely hard to sell. CEO throws people away faster than his lunch.

Where do I start? Terrible culture, poor management, sheer incompetence, and downright unethical. (Note: everything below mostly concerns the Founder/CEO. There's a Wall Street Journal blog article about him and Percolata.) Terrible Culture: CEO gives people a hard time if they don’t consistently work nights and weekends. He had regularly-scheduled, INTERNAL, in-office meetings on both Friday nights, starting at 6pm, and on weekends to ensure that people are working because he strongly believes in face time. It’s important to note that these Friday night and weekend meetings were not with external parties, e.g. customers, partners, etc.; they were only for internal planning. Clear indication that he doesn’t respect people’s time. He schedules meetings any time your calendar is free, without ever asking in advance; he’s done this on weekends too, when people’s work calendars are naturally open. You need approval to work from home, even when he’s traveling and you have no in-office meetings. He cares so much about people working and he’s so cheap that there’s no vacation policy. He advertises that you can take unlimited vacation, yet 1) you need approval before taking any days off, 2) when you do take time off, CEO gives you a hard time, 3) if it’s too long, he’s made employees go unpaid. For example, anything 2 weeks or more and he questions whether you’ll come back. Multiple folks had legitimate personal situations where they needed the time and he made them go unpaid and/or started looking immediately for that person’s replacement after just a couple of weeks. And 4) he’s deducted from employees’ paychecks for time off, sick time, and even holidays. CEO even specifically told some employees to not post the holiday schedule because he didn’t want others to know when the company-approved holidays are, so that people would work. Whenever the CEO was in the office, the air was noticeably sucked out of the room. If you ever had even a casual, intellectual, non-work conversation and he heard, he would interrupt because you weren’t working. CEO would rather staff people on useless tasks that don’t go anywhere, than let them take it easy, because “it’s good to keep people working.” He’ll even admit this. Morale was awful. CEO is cheap and amazingly greedy. Sometimes this is ok if you’re a startup that’s short on cash, but when it’s so extreme that it inhibits productivity, it’s terrible. When you’re too cheap to pay for software that makes a task take 30 minutes instead of 2 days, it’s a problem. When you’re so cheap that you don’t value people’s time or efforts, and you deduct pay from interns who want to take time off, it’s a problem. When you’re so cheap that you use used furniture from off the street and garage sales for your office, it’s a problem. If he’s this cheap, what do you think compensation is like? And when you’re so greedy, you’ll cut corners, you become incredibly unethical, which I’ll get to later. CEO is a strong believer in negative reinforcement. I rarely saw him thank employees for their contributions and even dismisses work that is done. Expectations were unrealistic, across all job functions, as far as how quickly something could get done. For example, if the first 10% of a project takes 5 hours, the expectation is that the remaining 90% takes 9*5 = 45 hours. However, this rationale excludes any sort of practical limitations such as the simple need for breaks, the fact that the last 90% of a task is usually harder and takes longer to do than the first 10% (let’s say, which can be done quickly and with poor quality), the need for quality control and checks, etc. You get the idea. And when you can’t accomplish this task, with good quality, in this 50 hours, you take a lot of criticism because you’re benchmarked on that first 5 hours. Now, imagine this happens for everybody, for every task. CEO operates in a shroud of secrecy. There’s no transparency at the company. How did a customer meeting go? Nothing. How did a conference go and what did you learn? Nothing. Employees genuinely want to learn and improve but how does this happen without any basic feedback? In addition, nobody has access to all of the financials, including the CFO, except the CEO. What kind of operation is that? CEO hides feedback from investors, keeps who the actual investors are secret, hides information about company financials and cap table…take a guess what else he is hiding. Poor Management: CEO displays all of the stereotypical attributes of an awful and inexperienced manager. First, picture the biggest micro-manager you can imagine. Daily check-in meetings every morning, with EVERY person. You have to explain what you did the day before and what you’ll do that day. And depending on your role, you have to review your actual work product with CEO, every day. If you’re lucky enough, he asks to see updates in the middle of the day too, after the morning update, asking why you haven’t accomplished X task in the say, 3 hours that passed. You get the idea that CEO has nothing better to do with his time. CEO has an amazing ability to escape accountability, and he somehow takes credit when things go well (which rarely happened) and blames other employees when things go wrong. He deludes you first by telling employees they’re in charge of a project, giving them responsibility. However, it’s always someone else’s fault. When we had a dispute with a third party, CEO blamed a former employee for going rogue, even though that employee followed CEO’s specific instructions. When CEO disclosed confidential information he shouldn’t have to another third party, he blamed it on an employee. And CEO has others sign certain documents when dealing with third parties because when he reneged on an agreement, it looked like it’s not his fault. Don’t worry though: when Sales closed a deal with a big customer, CEO took sole credit and dismissed the Salesperson’s accomplishment. What a guy. The favorite motto would be: “your goals are my goals.” It’s funny because CEO never had any goals. He’d overload everybody, then tell you you’re underperforming because you didn’t hit goals. If we didn’t hit revenue targets, it’s the Sales team’s fault (even though CEO is out there selling too). If investors criticized our product, it was product/engineering’s fault for not delivering. You can argue that it’s possible to assign blame elsewhere if this is a large firm, but back to the micro-managing point, CEO is in most meetings and knows what EVERY person is working on. If there’s really an issue, he should say something. After all, he’s the CEO. I never heard him once admit fault for anything. To add to it, CEO ran a campaign somehow got elected to Palo Alto’s City Council in late 2016 (more on this later). It seems extremely hypocritical for him to be unrealistic in his demands on employees’ time, yet when he himself holds a side job with the city government. And even before the election, he had been working for the city in a commissioner role. How can you credibly run a startup like this and maintain credibility with your employees? Employees suspected that he spent a fair amount of time working on his Palo Alto city government work while at Percolata. The fact that CEO never showed up prepared for any meeting and never reviewed any materials you sent him prior to any meeting certainly doesn’t help. Sheer Incompetence: Following up on an earlier point, CEO loved to have meetings. As an early stage startup, this is when you should move the quickest as a company. Yet, we had more meetings than you would at a big company, most of which were internal meetings to review work that was done or strategize. Everything was horribly inefficient. CEO consistently wouldn’t keep meetings on time, or even to an hour, and he didn’t know how to stay on topic, often digressing. Those Friday night meetings I alluded to usually ran 3-4 hours, EACH week. And, he would spend hours each week meeting about administrative detail, and wasting other employees’ time in the process. Each week, the head of each function spends anywhere from 4-8 hours with CEO planning what to do the next week. For a startup, it was amazing how many hours we worked, yet we got nothing done. As an extreme micro-manager, CEO was involved with everything and would meddle everywhere. He also thought he could do everything. He claimed he’s done most key functions before in prior roles: Sales, Marketing, Strategy, Product, and Engineering. Yet, if you talk to the head of any function, it’s clear he doesn’t know how to do any of these well. It’s also worse when he’s the Co-founder and sole decision-maker. We’ve had instances where the data and multiple third parties would advise us to proceed in a certain direction based on their credible experience, yet he’d ignore them based on no rationale and no argument whatsoever. Unethical: As bad as everything above sounds (if you've read this far), the worst part is the CEO is unethical and dishonest. Not only that, he encourages it from others too. Because he’s so cheap and greedy, he cuts corners. He’s reneged on agreements and willfully broken contracts. He’s lied to employees about compensation arrangements agreed to prior to employment. CEO encouraged employees to engage in underhanded tactics to obtain competitive intelligence. He consistently solicits free labor from students and interns, while deceiving them about potential employment prospects. He offers interns free housing, yet doesn’t mention until later that such free housing actually means you live in the office. And, do you think the office is actually up to residential building code? And, if he’s this cheap and greedy, what do you think he’s done with his own compensation? Think about it. If you read other Glassdoor reviews, there is a slew of negative reviews, all from former full-time employees. So what did CEO do? He went on a mission to drown out the negative reviews by asking his interns to post about their experience on Glassdoor before leaving. Don’t believe me? See for yourself. Every positive review to date is from an intern. How objective do you think these reviews are? While CEO’s campaign for Palo Alto public office is less relevant to Percolata, evidence of his questionable character is still important to note. Earlier in 2017, Palo Alto Online reported that he’s under state investigation for his handling of campaign finances. This surprised nobody. Even if he is exonerated in this instance, the pattern of unethical behavior is ongoing, unmistakable, and cannot be ignored.