Good potential wasted - Anonymous employee Smartness Employee Review

I know who’s writing, and I genuinely feel sorry about this message. If my approach was inconvenient in any way, I sincerely apologize. I'm also sorry that we had to part ways and that the last performance review was negative (and that you probably didn’t expect it). That said, I truly appreciate the feedback—it will definitely help me refine my approach and deepen my understanding of how to better support my colleagues in the right way. A few points about what you mentioned: I don’t give lectures during demos—that’s actually my co-founder, Tommaso, our CRO. Why does he do that? Because he has an incredible amount of experience in selling our product and the highest conversion rate in the company (well above 50%). No one else has achieved that level of success, so even if someone comes from "Amazon," Tommaso can still add value to them. The same goes for emails, response rates, and follow-ups—his track record speaks for itself. Some of the world's top founders had never scaled anything before building their first big company (which makes this assumption quite offensive), and many weren’t technical founders (or experienced CTOs)—think of the CEOs of Airbnb (industrial design), Amazon (who never wrote a line of code for the company nor was a famous CTO), Apple (Steve Jobs), Virgin (Richard Branson), and Alibaba (Jack Ma). So I’d say I’m in good company (and I've been studying these topics for the last 15 years) :) Sometimes, smart people assume that solving hard problems requires complex, time-consuming, and overly structured solutions. But that’s not always the case. More than once (actually, many times) in our company, we’ve over-engineered things, only to realize that the solution was much simpler—and sometimes, the "problem" wasn’t even a problem at all. Very glad that you liked our tech team so much :) I’d be happy to jump on a call to chat and dig deeper. With love, Luca