Pros
The benefits are pretty good. - Office spend is not a number but a set of things so you’re sure to be setup. - There’s a fitness And wellness benefit. The people are smart and eager to do what it takes to get things done. The company is incredibly well funded.
Kontras
The biggest con is the overall company culture which, in my opinion, is also affecting overall execution. The company values at one point were somewhere along the lines of trust, empowerment, empathy, curiosity, speed and intellectual rigor. These are all values that the CEO decided on himself in a bubble with no input before, during, and most surprisingly, after. As all communication goes in the company, everythings a presentation down with no discussion at all. Trust and Empowerment It’s nonexistent. There’s about 3 meetings every week where teams are reporting exactly what they’re doing to the CEO. The teams would guess at what they should do in the beginning of the week and the CEO would okay it, maybe change his mind mid week maybe not on a good day, then everything is reported out to the CEO again at the end of the week. It’s all top down. The complexities of making a decision are not conveyed at all and the whole company is bottlenecked from the top. Curiosity and Intellectual Rigor It’s encouraged but only if it lines up with what the CEO is feeling in the moment. You’re also encouraged to ‘just go do it’, but it all still depends. If you pick right, you get praise, If you pick wrong, you’re made to feel it’s a waste of time, if you decide to talk about it first, it’ll never get done. Speed The whole company goes hard and fast but usually for no strong reason. ‘We need to talk to customers to find the right thing to build’... unless you’re the CEO. One quick way you could get buy in though is to suggest that the idea came from Stripe, which isn’t a bad thing but the rest of the company do hold interesting ideas as well which we don’t source from. Taking a look at the reviews at Nylas from when the CEO reigned, there’s a familiarity with the sentiment expressed there even though it was an in office setting. Sort of quiet, the vibe feels a bit sterile in some ways. Also in regards to how people are treated in general, if you didn’t get a good idea from what’s been said already, it’s not great. Some situations that are a cause for concern: - I can’t get into any details but the CEO will go after employees for inconsequential things. I’d hope that he’d have better things to do but I guess not. - There have been plenty of optimistic hires from the CEO where there isn’t a fit but he goes out of his way to hire them anyways.. Trying to find Some kind of fit.. And then he ends up ‘getting rid of them’. ‘Getting rid of them’ is in quotes because we’d usually get the.. ‘We parted ways’ or ‘It wasn’t a good fit’ at the end of a few months. No transparency really. - There are more people who have left the company than currently at the company Like plenty startups, sounds good, feels great in the beginning, but it’s really all a lie. WorkOS is trying too hard to be what it is not.