3 Nov 2022
Nice tech, bad culture and management. Don't go there, especially if you are not a man.
Anonymous employee
Vaticle Response
3yThank you for your review and for keeping us accountable. I won't refute much of what you said, as you shared many truths about our past. I wish I'd done better 6 years ago, when most of the events you described transpired.
First of all, I apologise for letting you down. I was 24 when I started the business 7.5 years ago. I was learning how to run a business the first time, the hard way, and often the wrong way. I started as a young and naive CEO, and I hope I've learned and grown since then.
I did use to "micromanage". When someone made a mistake, I used to roll up my sleeves and show them how it's done or do it myself. It didn't scale. People will always make mistakes, including myself, and the only way to scale is to ensure people learn from their mistakes. I went from "how can I make this right?" to "what feedback can I give to help them learn?". This is a much slower strategy, but it's the only way to scale.
There's truth in the "CEO & COO arrogance", albeit more in me than my COO. I also apologise for "burning bridges", as it was never my intention. I admit we were often frustrated -- in pitching, debating pessimistic views, etc. It was not sustainable. We learnt that people (investors, clients) will always have different expertise, and that we need to bridge the gap.
There are truths in "lack of direction, stress, and layoffs", "name changes", and "hustle culture with unjustifiable pressure". As with many startups, we needed to iterate on our marketing strategy multiple times. I used to see every pivot as an existential threat. My fear was both genuine and naive, translating into more pressure than necessary. I don't know if the company would've died if we didn't push as hard, but I do now know that not every transition was existential. As for layoffs, we had one at the end of 2017, and one during the pandemic in 2020 when only two employees were laid off. The last time we had to pull long hours was when we completed Grakn 2.0 at the end of 2020.
At the start of 2021, I was medically obese, and diagnosed with a condition that could be terminal in 5 years. This was a turning point for me. Since then, I've changed my work habits, diet, exercise routine, and my entire life. In the last 2 years, I have lost 25kg, I have a different approach to work, and I'm now engaged to the love of my life. I admit that, previously, "hustling" was the thing I knew best. I still know how to do it exceptionally well. However, I now also see that there's much more to life than our company. I'm sharing my personal journey because, for better and for worse, who I am as a founder affects our company's culture.
I strongly disagree on "lying being encouraged". "Fake online users" has some truth but is not complete. It was not StackOverflow; you can verify that through these links.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/vaticle-typedb
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/vaticle-typeql
However, we did create some accounts to post questions on our old (Grakn's) discussion forum, the first time we launched it in 2016. We wanted to launch the forum, but we didn't want it to be empty, so we created questions ourselves to make new visitors feel comfortable. In hindsight, I should've just asked the team to post questions with their real username. Incidentally, earlier this year, we took down our old Grakn forum, and started a new one for TypeDB from scratch: https://forum.vaticle.com
When our first review on Glassdoor came in, I did think it was bad that we had just 1 review and it's negative. So I did ask present and past employees for their reviews, to help us build a more comprehensive view of our company. I don't believe this was wrong, but I should have continued the culture of asking everyone who joined the company to leave a review. So this time, I'll do just that.
We do lots of "code rewrites", but not for "little value". When we rewrote Grakn 2.0, performance went up 160x. Technology improves through iteration and evolution. We want to continue this, as it is how we advance.
I disagree "COO driving away business". Our COO has more to learn, as do all of us. Driving commercial growth is hard, especially when we still had to iterate on our strategy. Present event attendees are expectedly lower, as we're focusing on performance before we invest in marketing again.
On the point of me yelling, I sincerely apologise. I can see that the way I speak, coupled with my frustration in the past, would not have resulted in a positive experience. I do believe this has changed in the last few years.
I hope my response gives you some peace of mind. I thank you for taking the time to hold us accountable. Most importantly, I sincerely apologise that you did not get the better version of me, and that I had let you down. I've tried to learn from every mistake I've made in the past, and I hope to deliver a better and healthier version of me to all our present and future employees.
Sincerely,
Haikal / CEO
