7y
Thanks for your feedback and I’m sorry that your experience has been so negative. Sorry for the long response, but since you took the time to write such a detailed review, I wanted to do the same.
We truly do care about our team and our customers and I’m sorry that you haven’t seen that expressed through our actions.
I’ve had the extraordinary experience of building a business with my dad – and two other partners. As the youngest member of the founding team I’ve had the privilege of learning from each of them. Working side by side with my dad, he coached and mentored me for 18 years. Even longer if you count how he helped me run an ice cream bike business from age 16-20 and a painting business in my final summer of university. He’s an incredible man who always showed interest in me and my entrepreneurial spirit. I am forever grateful for the time we got together building this business.
We hire lots of great young people. We like the energy and ideas they bring to our company. The highest performers are rewarded with rapid expansion of compensation and responsibility, and I’m sorry that you haven’t seen that.
Like any software company, our technology is a work in progress, but our growth from 35 to 135 team members over the past few years shows that our customers get value from the work we do. Our team is stronger than ever and I’m truly excited about our future prospects.
With rapid growth, it became harder for me to truly know every member of our team. We had a culture, but weren’t being explicit in trying to design our culture and values. As the partners and I worked to develop our Culture Code last year we thought it was important to explain what we value in an effort to guide our team towards the culture we want. Ultimately the Culture Code is part ‘what we are’ and part aspirational. We have room to be better, but I assure you that we are committed to living our values and I’m sorry you haven’t seen that.
Since I became CEO over a year ago now, we’ve had to make many tough decisions about who can be part of our team. We do our very best to treat each person with respect – even when things don’t work out. It’s tough to have candid conversations about performance when things aren’t going well, but this is one of our values because we believe it’s absolutely critical. Great people want feedback and want to improve. We believe they should be given that chance and I’m sorry if you’ve known people who didn’t feel that they were given that opportunity to improve. As a management team we’re working on improving our skills in this area and we all recently read a book called ‘Radical Candor’, and then had offsite training in an effort to improve our skills and knowledge around how to give candid feedback. We are working hard to be better.
Thanks again for your feedback and please drop me an email or swing by my office if you’re willing to talk about your thoughts further.
Thanks,
Joe
