Backing up the most recent reviews here as extremely valid. Accelo WAS formerly a great place to work and after the acquisition by Bow River Capital, things rapidly fell apart. There was so much smoke and mirrors with BRC Leadership announcing one thing and then discreetly having HR do the exact opposite. In one scenario, the new owner even cluelessly and vocally suggested terminating certain individuals who were sitting around the same table as him! Talk about awkward.
A good percentage of the company was rapidly let go simultaneously. A few folks who held all the product knowledge or who had been there since the beginning were completely axed regardless of their seniority or contributions to our client base. Essentially after Geoff stepped down, the next week all VPs and management were terminated without speaking to most of them.
We originated in San Francisco during peak Silicon Valley before gradually pivoting here to Denver as HQ, all of those guys remaining in San Fran were instantly let go, I believe one of them on the West Coast had been at Accelo since the beginning ten years ago and worked with some of our most legacy clients. Subsequently, our Canadians were let go, everyone on my marketing team, product and most of our sales were wiped out too.
As you can see from the other reviews, all kinds of shady unethical things happened behind the scenes. During the week of lay-offs, it became apparent that certain colleagues in the Australia and Denver offices had collaborated with our new owners, essentially out of existing the chain of command to rank everyone and recommend terminations based on a lot of personal detail. I saw that someone was let go for being too old, others for being new parents and having small children, others for speaking up and calling the injustice out. This of course can never be proven since HR always adds their own spin to the story to protect the company. Ironically, we also recently had our own sensitivity bullying training and the sad way this all transpired totally disregarded all of that virtue signaling by going against our company values.
Candidly from a product perspective, we’ve been working on rolling out VERSION 4 of Accelo for quite some time while delaying more popular requests from our client’s ideas forum. VERSION 4 is largely flawed in design with many quirks, inconsistencies and broken/ missing pieces. Our pricing and bundling have changed a thousand times making it confusing to go to market and to pitch to prospects. Our product isn’t competitive in the long run as it is missing several key popular feature requests over the years and has only had symbolic overhauls in mostly unasked areas. Not to mention the obvious fact that all of the key long-term leaders and managers who were driving the meaningful changes and development have been kicked out. Our product researchers were axed and without Geoff, there’s no real lead architect for Accelo on VERSION 4. Even our system engineers who maintain Accelo’s uptime and other co-founders have been let go. So when Accelo eventually has a future crash, who can even restore it back online?
Goes without saying that I highly wouldn’t recommend working here or buying this product as it has become SO TOXIC this past quarter. To top it all off in terms of unethical displays of corporate takeovers, our leaders on the sales/ marketing side were two freshly hired VPs, who were actively recruited from their previous companies where they were sitting pretty. They left their jobs to come work for Accelo, just weeks before the new owners took over. Without ever meeting them or a single conversation, they were also both sent packing and left on the street to join the masses of unemployed, never able to work on their visions. HR seemed to be receiving their orders from BRC in real-time and fired everyone through quick impersonal calls scheduled with barely any notice or even worse, over cold and impersonal email; severance packages were an insulting joke.
