Held together by a shoestring with the veneer of tech “paint”.
Pros
Capsule is trying to solve hard problems and disrupt the outdated pharmacy industry. I appreciate the customer-centricity of the service and the attention to the mission. Individuals across some functions are smart and collaborative.
Cons
If you want to read between the lines — being “hyper focused on growth” means Capsule raised a bunch of money to scale, so they’re trying to hire bodies really fast. This has been the most dysfunctional company I’ve ever worked for. Hiring for volume really lowered the bar in the types of candidates we were closing and the overall quality of engineers and product people suffered as a result. This also resulted in an output driven culture rather than an outcome driven one. Rather than hiring the right people to execute on the most impactful things well, Capsule seemingly has a cluster of people executing on a lot of things pretty poorly. For example, before I left, there was a team with 10+ engineers all working individually on random projects. Without proper ratios of product and design to eng, these random projects weren’t cohesive in strategy or even impactful to the business considering the grand scheme of things. “The culture is more like Amazon than Google,” — this really means Capsule is a high cost business. Operating at cost (free delivery in NYC) without scale means they have no moat, resulting in noticeable frugality in employee programs and initiatives that other companies regularly employ. I’m not talking about free snacks here… a table stakes example is base salaries are lower than market. Equity offerings are also a joke. As the company grew, it’s practices increasingly became hypocritical, considering one of their values is “taking care of”. On the ops side, hourly employees are treated almost as expendable resources, swapped out like assembly line workers in a modern day factory. Leadership openly talked about hourly employees like this in hallways where people could hear. Communication across the company was both obscured and ineffective. On one hand, there was info disseminating from all sources and on the other, important discussions and decisions happened behind closed doors without any context being shared to individuals most affected. Company-wide communication (top down) was very general, focusing on the “what” versus the “why”. It would be more useful to spend time on why the company wasn’t meeting metrics and how teams were going to solve key challenges. The planning process also deprecated over time with new execs at the helm having no experience in effectively mobilizing a cross-functional tech org. Presenting a list of features in quarterly meetings without consulting engineers or the teams doing the actual work created severe misalignment in what was communicated at an exec level versus what teams were actually working on. The CEO is a first-time founder. Although he knows the industry inside out, he’s never built a business like this before. His leadership style does not create a culture that empowers or inspires people to do their best work — he is not a good partner to technical or product counterparts nor does he trust his exec counterparts to lead their teams. Join Capsule knowing the amount of VC funding they’ve raised will greatly impact your work experience here. Deeply weigh whether altruism is worth losing contribution to what you need from a company in order to function at your best.
