A great business with a difficult culture
Pros
Rokt is a good business. It has strong revenue growth, a profitable P&L, and talented staff. It is on a long term growth pathway and I don't see any major risks to this trajectory. Any business like this will garner a reputation that will be of benefit to your future prospects, and should you have equity in your compensation package it is very likely to become liquid at some point. If you are working on the technical side of the business, you are likely to get good exposure to intelligent senior staff members that are both technically strong and good at running technical organizations. If you are working on the commercial side, you will get exposure to some real heavy hitters that are very good at their job, and will get agency-like pace of learning. Because the business basically includes IQ tests in the hiring process, the team includes some outstanding members. Whether they are used to their fullest capacity is another question, but you will build good relationships if you enjoy working with intelligent people. The benefits are strong, including 20 days of PTO, lunch in the office every day, health insurance and wellness benefits. There is a destination "offsite" every year that takes the whole business to a fun location for several days of rah rah and culture building. The actual events are slightly nauseating but the opportunity to have fun with colleagues is always welcome and the investment by the business is appreciated by the staff.
Cons
Rokt has a very particular culture that works well for some, and not for others. If you are considering a senior role at Rokt you should read this carefully. I'm defining senior role as L6 and above, where L6 is senior management, L7 is proto-executive, and L8 is executive. If you are more junior, then you can safely ignore this as the effects I'll describe seem to largely kick in at L6 and above (though it should be said that in GTM this culture appears to permeate into lower levels). The TLDR is this: If you come here expecting to be an executive, you will be disappointed. If you come here expecting to serve power efficiently, you may do very well. The lynchpin of the culture is that the CEO is always right. This is Founder Mode on steroids. There is a bit of pageantry around a debate and discussion culture, where alternative opinions are occasionally sourced and tolerated, but all aspiring Rokt'stars should know that the resolution of any debate is that the CEO's opinion wins out. This culture of the CEO always being right flows down into numerous dysfunctions, some of which I will outline below. Firstly, executives in the business are basically cut-outs. They do have executional responsibilities, but they have very little to no say over how to run their functions, let alone the strategy of the business at large. I personally saw how leaders would be brought in and then quickly become disillusioned as they came to understand that their role was an unholy mix of a function chief of staff, a face to put on press releases, and a punching bag. There are some people that are quite happy to play this kind of role, and some people that are not. The second, related, dysfunction is that personnel decisions are made by the CEO, often without consultation or collaboration of the executive team. There are frequent reorganizations across every area of the business. These include renaming areas, promotions and demotions, changing focus areas for teams or individuals, and of course terminations. The rationale for these reorganizations is opaque, even when explanations are given, and people often find themselves moving from team to team or topic to topic. This is a deeply disempowering system. Executives sometimes find themselves communicating changes to their team without understanding the background or rationale themselves. They do not have the capacity to push back or even to grumble, because this reliably leads to their own exit in the near future. Executives can also experience rapid and unexplained changes to their role, which should be clear from the long list of public press releases announcing new executives in the business that are no longer at Rokt 1-2 years later. There are some people that are happy to follow behind an overbearing CEO, and some that are not. The third, and most pernicious dysfunction that I observed was the internal politics. It is true that every organization has politics, so I don't begrudge Rokt the fact that they exist. However, it is a particularly bad politics. Due to the culture that I outlined above, smart operators have come to understand that the fastest and most reliable pathway to advancement is to cultivate a relationship with the CEO and the CEO's wife, to understand the CEO's priorities, and then to insert oneself into every discussion of these priorities. This leads to a range of pretty nasty internal politics. The contributions of rival staff are diminished in informal settings, executives regularly overclaim their own role in work and successes (I have seen somebody claim they did something literally in front of the person who actually did it), and ambitious staff make a habit of proposing things that they know the CEO will like, even when they know it is a bad idea or a distraction. Meetings that include the CEO will include ambitious staff that make a point to echo the CEO's opinion as loudly and frequently as possible, or to obsequiously agree with everything the CEO says. While it is not true that everyone that thrives at Rokt is unscrupulous, it is true that Rokt allows the unscrupulous to thrive. This is prima facie a bad culture for those that value integrity. It’s worth noting that the Founder Mode culture does extend to micromanagement, with the CEO often reaching deep into the organization to make seemingly trivial changes and directives. This is not always a bad thing, but it can lead teams down unproductive rabbit holes, and frustration from the teams that have their priorities randomized by unpredictable interventions. It is not clear to me whether the CEO views these cultural dynamics as explicit trade-offs, or simply secondary effects of a management style that has delivered strong business performance. My sense is that the culture is believed to be an acceptable - and perhaps inevitable - byproduct of how the organization is led. There is a funny and ironic twist to this, which is that Rokt has a senior officer whose job is to alternately justify the culture as "high performance" through stretched sporting analogies, and to talk about cultural elements that are clearly not widely shared. For example, if you ever hear the words "people first" or "care" as cultural elements, stay cautious. You will find that a key executive skill at Rokt is accepting without complaint the regular slathering of high performance culture schmaltz without having an allergic reaction. As a result of what I have described above, Rokt has a high attrition rate for senior staff, due to a mix of terminations and forced resignations. It is also the case that significantly more than half of senior hires have no aspirations to remain at the company any longer than is strictly necessary for their economic and career objectives. Conversations around "doing your time" are common. Very few actively enjoy their work. Those who do well in environments where political skill is critical, who prefer a "chief of staff" type role to a real executive role, and who are happy to have the CEO set all priorities, will be able to find a home at Rokt. Those looking for a true executive mandate, some degree of autonomy with regards to their personnel and priorities, and a cohesive executive team of peers, will not find it here.