Pros
A good introduction to computer vision, a sub-category of AI which might receive the same amount of interest as LLMs or Generative AI in future.
Cons
I originally wasn't going to leave a review here. Having been laid off, I was happy to put the mistake of joining Viso behind me and move on. However, it seems the negative (and accurate) reviews prior to this one have caused a wave of panic and childish behaviour in Viso; my LinkedIn profile was being viewed by one co-founder, meanwhile it seems I've been blocked by the other co-founder and sales leadership too. Childish and panic-ridden behaviour is probably a good place to start with this review, and a huge part of the reason why I was happy to be laid off. During my interview process, I was informed that as a founding member of the sales team, I'll be able to rely on a healthy stream of inbound leads which should result in several mid-range ($40-50k) deals closing per quarter, and I'll have larger 6-figure deals to work for the year. Soon after joining, I found myself using ChatGPT to support an initiative driven by the founders to create fake case studies about fake 'unnamed' customers who apparently used Viso to solve for various pains. This was when the penny really started to drop for me. Further signs that I had perhaps made a mistake in joining were evident when I realised most customers on their website were not in fact customers, more so marketing agreements and the recurring revenue figure mentioned by the founders was also inaccurate, largely made up of scrappy monthly deals that require a lot of ongoing managed services from Viso to run the solution. I've always tried to be an optimist, I was determined to keep my head up and hope for the best in the hope that organisations would begin to prioritise Computer Vision more heavily. Inbound requests did come in, usually from low level ICs and project managers at large Enterprise companies, who were usually exploring the technology and were unsure of whether or not Computer Vision could solve their problems. Regardless of this, each inbound request kicked off a 'panic-attack' type of response from one of the co-founders who micromanaged us beyond belief to ensure we were following up on leads, booking the meeting and attending those meetings. Micromanagement is rife at this place, the same co-founder would read your emails, and basically drag you into a Slack war of messages, back and forth, back and forth, thread after thread, about the quality of your work or some apparent mistake you'd made when interacting with clients. This co-founder rarely joined Teams calls, rarely spoke up in front of people, and seemed to enjoy keeping his endless communications at all times of the day via Slack. Seems he wasn't brave enough to have these tough conversations verbally. Micromanagement and panic-ridden or childish behaviour continued with their choice in sales leadership. Sales leadership joined in April and straight away, basically started making comments about P45s, which really added further stress to an already stressful, chaotic and unprofessional environment. Sales leadership adopted bullying tactics, interrogating reps on deal review calls in front of the team to catch them out, when oftentimes it was actually sales leadership who was leading (micromanaging) the deal they were asking about anyway. Threats were regular from this individual, they were regularly aggressive and condescending, I don't miss being asked a question on a deal review and being immediately or rudely interrupted 10 seconds into my answer. Sales leadership didn't just join all client calls, they joined, took over and typically went on to overwhelm clients with 10+ minute monologues about fake customer stories, Computer Vision best practices based on their less than 1 year experience in the field, and so on. Sales leadership typically then decided which deals were worth working, which ones weren't based on a whim. They'd get excited by some logos, citing MEDDPICC selectively and forcing reps to close/lost other deals seemingly based on their own lack of interest, rather than actually listening to reps or being supportive. If this wasn't enough micromanagement, each deal you work will have a Slack channel including both founders and sales leadership. You can expect plenty of panicky, chaotic and gaslighting messages in these channels to make you feel like you're not doing your job correctly, that it's your fault some lowly IC at a F500 company went cold and so on. The co-founders simply haven't a clue how to strategically run a deal, and will happily harass you based on whatever strategy they've come up with. The product itself has a nice UI, it looks impressive, but it kind of ends there unfortunately. The product actually depends heavily on a lot of Open-Source libraries and technology like PyTorch, Tensorflow, OpenCV and so on. The labelling/annotation tool for training models is actually just CVAT, which again is online and has a free version to be used. They're depending on the market not figuring out how to train AI models and deploy working applications themselves. This is a competitive space. Competitors such as V7, Roboflow, Encord, Matroid, Zensors, Google Cloud, AWS and more are out there making a lot of noise, moreover, their founders or teams are actually out there speaking at events, uploading video interviews, educating the market directly, doing podcasts and so on, instead of hiding behind a screen and micromanaging their circa 12 full time employees into the stratosphere. I was lied to when interviewing for Viso. You may hear other similar lies such as fake customers, amount of recurring revenue, they might even mention that they've got some sort of culture going on in here. They don't, you'll sit at home with a cheap Windows laptop and gradually start going insane due to the sheer amount of Slack messages from the co-founders. You might hear suggestions that if you join, you'll become a millionaire. Read my review again, it's a very competitive space, other foundersare doing much more to educate the market and are actually putting their faces out there. You need to do more than writing blog articles for SEO purposes if you're going to compete in this race. Finally, despite being laid off a mere 3 months ago, I see they're already hiring for a new salesperson. You need to realise you're taking a big risk with these people. They barely have 12 FTEs and are already trying to emulate Big Tech by disposing of people the moment they panic. PS. The "Exciting Startup" review with 5 stars is clearly fake. There is no Account Executive at Viso with over a year's experience. There were three, and we were all laid off.
