A lesson in how not to run a company - Anonymous employee Umbel Employee Review

I am a former Umbel employee who has avoided writing a review of my time there out of respect for the friends that remained at the company, but given recent events and the clearly over-inflated rating that the company and CEO have received here on GlassDoor, I feel it is irresponsible not to warn other prospective employees of what they might be getting into. But first, I should start this off by saying that I loved Umbel. I loved the promise of what it could be, and I loved the team I worked with. But all of that is gone now. When I started at Umbel several years ago, there was a large engineering team and a top down focus on building out the new technology that would take us to profitability. After some funding troubles the CEO was replaced, and the engineering team was split in half, with one half going on to form a separate company, and the other staying behind to continue building out the Umbel platform. During that split, Umbel sent its CTO over to the new company, and more than a year later, there is still no CTO in place at Umbel. This is a tech startup with no top down vision for the tech, and none of the executives seem terribly troubled by that, probably due to their lack of experience running a SaaS company. Instead, the CEO is finding ways to have articles and blog posts written about how great she is for women in tech (at my last check, the last female engineer has just left the company). Meanwhile, the company continued to hire more and more people for the marketing and sales team, and let their engineering team dwindle to a husk of its former self. When I asked if there was any concern that the marketing team was larger than the engineering team, the response I got was, “well, they’re easier to hire.” The few engineers that remained spent their entire time putting out fires and running support instead of building new features, which is a shame, because there is still some absolutely stellar engineering talent at Umbel, but it has been ignored for so long that it may be too late to salvage. On the client-facing side of things, hiring efforts seemed to focus more on finding folks who would toe the line rather than finding top talent, and management actively pushed away or actively fired the little talent that remained towards the end of my tenure. I don’t doubt some of the more active clients are now wondering if they even have a dedicated client partner, seeing as they’ve been through so many in the past year. Meanwhile the Media Services team, the only part of the company which consistently meets or exceeds its targets, isn’t valued for the success it is. Instead it’s run like a meat grinder, churning through employee after employee until they cannot take the hours any more, and then someone new is brought in. The executives are so focused on their own image that they fail to support the sole value prop the company has. Instead the leadership thinks it is a worthwhile use of time to sequester members of an already small and struggling team to come up with the amazing new product idea that will save the company, as if Umbel hadn’t already tried to pivot a half-dozen times in the past two years. After what seems like months of closed door meetings, the idea is announced to the company at an all-team meeting and we are assured that “innovation is alive at Umbel!” At which point it is painfully clear that the CEO is blissfully unaware of how hard building software is. By now you can count the number of developers on one hand, and we’re supposed to support the current platform AND build an entirely new product from scratch? Even with ten times the engineering power that would be a struggle. All this brings us to the present day, where Umbel has laid off a fifth of its work force right before the Christmas holiday, giving even those who had been there for years barely any severance. They even rescinded a job offer the day before a new employee was supposed to start. Do they just not know how much runway they have left anymore? When word of this got out (in the form of former employees posting to social media, asking for any and all help in finding new jobs for those who had been fired), at least one executive thought it best to track down one such poster’s employer and try to have them take the post down. When you see basic human empathy as a threat, it’s time for some serious self-reflection. If you’re thinking of joining the Umbel team, just be aware of what you’re getting into. This is a company that could collapse at any moment, where ego is more important than talent or quality work, and where technology is an afterthought to image. If that sounds like the kind of tech company you want to join, then godspeed and good luck.