Unethical from the tops-down - shady behavior on messing with people’s roles and reporting lines, on our product and data, on not wanting to be compliant with anything, on our hr approach, on compensation, no transparency with people on both the business and their own roles, saying one thing and doing another.
This goes for ceo (which I’ve personally seen) cto and new coo - everyone at the top fundamentally acts unethical in how they treat people but also how they make business decisions, always looking for short term cheapest solution, saying yes and then “changing their mind” and pulling back on promises, always thinking they know best and not listening to anyone with any expertise or real growth company experience, etc. Anyone with a spine that was keeping them honest or in their place has now left. It is not an environment senior women can succeed (all of them left, which makes me wonder what I’m still doing here.)
On a day to day basis you should be prepared to:
- be promised things in your offer letter that will not materialize or that they will go back on
- be made false promises about equity that are completely out of line with reality of the value of our stock and how much it will cost you to exercise
- get false promises or commitments on who your manager is or isn’t
- get false promises or commitments on what your role is or isn’t
- be told to do jobs of one or two levels above you when everyone leaves, and get no additional compensation or recognition for it
- have zero career growth or opportunity for promotion because either the ceo wants to hire some name brand expensive senior leader (who will end up leaving in 6-9 months) or the coo will want to hire his buddy (who may or may not be relevant to our business or have even been interviewed by anyone)
- be prepared to get slacks at all hours of the day and night and weekend on complicated topics and when you ask to have a live conversation instead be told that the company is remote-first and no one wants a meeting and a meeting is a waste of time and too expensive, so just spend 2 weeks frustratingly going back and forth on a slack channel instead as half the company gets added to the conversation
- be prepared at any time for the ceo to jump into a channel and kill a whole project, idea, person, or alignment that everyone had
- when you raise things you think are unethical or illegal the ceo or cto or both will tell you it’s not true and gaslight you
- no pay transparency or pay equality
- an hr team that does not have a backbone and makes our culture worse not better by following the whims of senior leadership
- no real cfo and thus no real path for growth or liquidity or ipo
- no real sales team despite being a sales software, and no ability to keep one of the best sales leaders in the market in our former cro
- a toxic work culture where everyone fears the ceo and instead of solving problems the company needs solving or that the product and our customers need solving, everyone operates like order takers from the ceo who keeps changing approach and direction every month because he doesn’t know what he is doing and does not trust anyone
- be told an “optional” offsite is happening next week (truly) and be given like 2 weeks notice max for any travel
The factors are too many. Do not count on your stock being worth anything. If you have another option take it instead of Apollo until/unless things fundamentally change. Every day I wish I would have taken the other offer I was considering at the time I took Apollo. I hope I am not here for much longer.
