Zūm reviews

There are a lot of cons. - Promotions here only happen as a result of something negative like someone quitting/getting fired/getting laid off. - On the subject of layoffs, at least 50 people (or half of the workforce here) from engineering/product, sales, and operations have been laid off in the last few months. The company is in serious trouble financially. Shutting down, going bankrupt, that kind of trouble. - Leadership demonstrates blatant favoritism of sales and school account management. Front line operations and support just got outsourced to a call center in El Salvador. After reading all of this, one might think, "Company morale must be low." Leadership made the holiday team off site mandatory for all employees, and then HR would go around harassing and pressuring people who were not signed up. The holiday party was also mandatory for all employees, to give an impression of one big happy family. For all hands meetings, leadership decided to create propaganda videos to show to the company. The CEO is literally demanding applause from the audience. Think of a dictatorship in an authoritarian country. Zum is going down that route. As other reviews have mentioned, the CEO is totally disconnected and out of touch with what is going on. Her brother, the COO is a fool who is completely incompetent in managing the day to day business of Zum. The ship is on fire and it is sinking. Avoid this place.

LEADERSHIP - Zum has the absolute worst leadership you can possibly imagine. The entire C Suite has no business leading a company. The CEO, CTO, and COO are siblings and they operate in a bubble, trying to hide their shortcomings and failures rather than handing over responsibilities to people that actually know what they're doing. They did a great job raising $75M from top VC's like Sequoia and Spark and they've done an even better job of burning through it. Staffing up a developer team that accounted for 1/3 of their staff that produced nothing. The tech the sell is not what they actually have. EVERYTHING is managed with spreadsheets and throwing more bodies at the problem instead of trying to find more efficient ways to operate. This caused SO MANY operating failures with children with disabilities being stranded without a ride. I would never allow my child to ride with Zum. Vivek constantly dismissed the competitors like HopSkipDrive and ALC and was constantly saying Zum was being approached to purchase them. They hired some great talent that could have helped them scale but they refused to listen to anyone or seek the counsel of people that can help them solve their inefficiencies. In an attempt to become profitable, they first laid off all the tech team (which they needed to do), then they throw an over the top Xmas party at a Vinyard, then they lay off 95% of their sales team. Favorite quote when Vivek was asked how they are going to get profitable after cutting sales... "I don't know how to answer that, we're literally building the plane while we're flying" Okie Dokie... good luck with that.