The CEO. All roads lead to Karen. She is the alpha and the omega. The sun sets and rises on her command. She is the VP of Product, the CMO, the VP of Sales, and the CS Director. She can do your job better than you (she'll let you know how easy it used to be to do your job when the company was smaller). It will not be needed if you have any experience in your field and are looking to bring that with you to the new role. Your ideas will be dismissed if results are not seen early on and you'll likely be pulled into another role that is quasi-associated with your current department. 6 months will go by and now that you're the marketing-sales-partnerships-customer service person that is responsible for multiple projects across all departments, your time to do your core job will slip. That will not stop you from being held accountable for "the thing we hired you to do". On the flip side, if you do complete your core KPI's then you'll be undercut by a random metric or company-wide goal that was not achieved. This is all a part of the fact that Karen's problems (running the company as CEO and founder) are your problems. There is an expectation to "act as CEO' even though there is absolutely no incentive to do so. No commissions, no shares of the company offered, no bonuses, no spiffs. There isn't even any infrastructure for these kinds of incentives to be given. There are no standard annual evaluations, it's all done by "feel". When feedback is given it is impromptu and is mostly a chance for the CEO to blow off steam by publicly yelling and cursing at her employees and reminding them just how much their wages are costing the company. Ultimately, she sees her employees as a liability as opposed to an asset. This could be digestible at the mid-mgmt level if there were layers between her and lower-level employees but she relishes in the nitty gritty parts of the business and concerns herself with down-in-the-weeds issues like mislabeling contact lifecycle stages in the CRM. This leads to direct confrontation with any and all individuals of the go-to-market teams. If you're very junior and cannot find work elsewhere this could be a fit for you. Otherwise, you'll be better off holding out until new leadership comes along (not likely to happen).
