Postscript reviews

It pains me to say this, but misogyny runs rampant and is concentrated at the top. The cofounders, while good people, just don’t have the experience they need to be able to identify when they are leaning into their biases. The company is trying to do all the right things as far as DEI efforts, but without some accountability from senior leadership in this area, I don’t expect much in the way of true change.

This startup is very young and immature. In my experience, the vibe has been “Mission first, troop welfare second”. Leadership sets really (overly) ambitious goals and outright tells everyone the goals will be hard to hit, possibly insanely hard to hit, but "we can do hard things." But this has been proven over and over with startups, if you're shooting for goals that you know will be insanely hard to hit (and you often miss them by a lot) even with a fully staffed, and not mention insanely lean setup across the org, strategizing and forecasting isn't great. Goals based on ambition and not raw data that you know for a fact your people can hit within a healthy and reasonable amount of time and effort spent - isn't sustainable and many of us have suffered because of this. You'll hear directly from leadership that "productivity and hitting goals" are #1. They say it a lot, and you can be doing great in your job but have a leader stretching you even further (beyond what's healthy) and finding ways to somehow keep stretching you and lighting a fire under you because output matters way more than your mental health and work/life harmony regardless of what the values on the career page say. They say they care, but actions just aren't there to prove it. Also, this is an extremely meeting-heavy culture.. There is a meeting for anything and everything, and it's no wonder we aren't hitting goals when leadership spends more time talking and planning and reviewing than actually building and executing. Employee retention has noticeably been going downhill, and that's all the info you really need. Great people are leaving left and right because leadership refuses to promote them despite their contributions. I know several people in crucial roles actively job seeking right now including myself because we SEE what is happening and can't stand for it anymore. The whole environment here is becoming more and more toxic.