-Tech/App: Is terrible. Gympass is obsessed with "winning" in the US, but you cannot "win" in the US if you have a terrible app and user experience. It has gone through improvements since I started, but it is nowhere near where an app should be in the US. Its incredibly buggy, logs you out all the time, crashes, etc. It was amazing to see how many CX employees were fighting for support for their clients. No urgency to fix anything ever, things can always wait for the tech team that I think is still based out of Brazil
-Management: Essentially all global leaders or anyone that matters are just Brazilian harvard business school men that all worked at some big 4 consulting firm. Groupthink is huge here. Maybe they should take a page out of some HBS case study and look up "think global, act local". Things that work in Brazil won't necessarily work in the US, stop jamming it down our throat, there's lots of talented US employees who have years of experience here. OKRs (don't even get me started on this garbage) are created by people who don't even sniff what's going on in the ground floor on these teams. During the beginning of the pandemic, things in the industry were changing daily. You're trying to adjust and bring findings to management, but it didn't matter, has to be tied to the OKRs. THROW THAT OUT THE WINDOW. Next QTR they changed OKRs for the team and used my suggestion but since it came from a global leader, it was now on everyone's to do list.
^To add to all this, I'm not one to bring in gender into anything, but as a male coming into the company, it was interesting to see that none of the leaders were male -- first thing I noticed (coming from another startup that was successful and was acquired, over half of our leadership was female). There's a ton of talented women here, and by the time I left they were getting some of the spotlight globally but lots more work needs to be done. Gympass will have these global town halls, and it would just be male after male presenting. Just recently they started having the head of HR who's a female get more speaking time, but they also tried to squeeze in another female exec from marketing in at the end but it seemed like an afterthought. People would run on and on about their updates, but save 2 minutes at the end (or just go over the allocated time) for marketing, where she had some of the biggest and most important updates to share.
-Work ethic: There's no work smarter not harder mentality here. Its just work hard, break things, worry about it later. There's a ton of extremely manual processes here
-Politics: This company is by Brazilians, for Brazilians. They love to move people around the company through internal referrals and promotions, often putting someone with no experience in roles that directly require experience. Its all to help out someone who's cozy with global leaders or HQ, that want to come to work in the US, etc. I actually love that they do this when it works, but on my team it did not work at all and it was one of the major reasons why it was difficult for our new team/department to succeed. When you have a company that is almost entirely comprised of sales and marketing folks, it's hard to find new fresh ideas, tech improvements, and people who can execute on those ideas etc. Not every problem in the world can be solved by sales and negotiating.
-HR: Never really had too many negative interactions with them, actually thought everyone was fairly nice and approachable. But when they decided to lay off essentially our whole team (previous Gympass employees were kept, go figure) they really fumbled on all aspects of my exit. They tried finding me places internally, which I appreciated, but they were recommending me a ton of low level positions that weren't really close to what I needed. They also messed up my employee grade level, changed up option award structure, and had me coded in an irrelevant department. They also had me do a case study for an INTERNAL interview...yup you read that right. And HR told me that I didn't have to do a presentation for it, so I didn't. When I went into the internal interview they expected a full 20-30 minute presentation. Needless to say I thanked them for the opportunity and headed for the exit.
