Ruthless culture.
At an all-hands meeting, when Usermind introduced a new senior leader, reporting directly to the CEO, , the CEO told the following story of why the other leading candidate was not hired. Although highly inappropriate in my opinion, to reveal such details of hiring decisions, especially in front of the winning candidate, let alone the entire company, the CEO pressed on. Both candidates were interviewed by the Board Chair, a prominent venture capitalist. It turned out that the losing candidate was raised on his family’s cattle ranch. The Chair was somehow inspired to ask that candidate, “at your ranch, did you kill the cows yourself, or did you outsource that to a meat packing plant?” When the candidate responded that this ugly task was outsourced, apparently that clinched the decision in favor of the other candidate. Ironically the winning candidate comes from a culture where many revere cows.
After the senior leader, the “cow” killing began in earnest. Specifically, the entire engineering staff either resigned or was fired within the year. The leader literally had to beg the last remaining experienced engineers to stay on so that systems could be kept operational. Even so, they all leftleft a few months later.
Replacements were hired, but most have also left. Often the reason was the engineering director would arbitrarily overrule technical decisions without consulting the most experienced engineers on the team.
The cow killing extended beyond engineering. Specifically, the CRO, Chief of Human Resources, and Chief of Customer Sicess also left around the same time.
Not surprisingly, the cow killing seems only to extend downwards. When the CEO ordered yet another three month death march, threatening in a meeting to fire all the engineers with dismissal if the deadline was missed, the new leader admitted privately that the deadline was impossible, but said that he’d lose his job if he pushed back. In the end, the leader acquiesced to the impossible deadline.
