It's truly terrible - Anonymous employee Acquco Employee Review

Where does one even begin? The CEO micromanages **everybody** and rather than call or message people directly whenever there is an issue, will call employees out in public Slack channels for everybody to see. It doesn't matter what time of day or day of the week, there is no respect for boundaries or any semblance of work/life balance. This leadership style trickles down to most of the rest of the management team and complicating matters further, there's so many levels of micromanagement that this culture creates an avalanche effect to lower-level employees. It would be one thing for this to exist at a fortune 500 company but this is a Series A startup, there should never be this many layers of management at a company in this stage. There's no strategy to the brands they acquire, all leadership cares about is increasing EBITDA. Once they acquire any new brands, they all go into the toilet for a variety of reasons. These range from not doing proper due diligence (most of the sellers they work with are running shady businesses in China) to poor supply chain to brand management being incompetent. Speaking of brand management, it is truly a disaster. There's like 4 or 5 different levels of Brand Manager titles and people are promoted/demoted not based on their quality of work, but whether or not they personally like you. The work that the brand managers do doesn't even matter because as mentioned earlier, the CEO micromanages everything and will make decisions on a whim that often negates the work somebody has been working on for weeks or months. Supply chain is somehow even more of a disaster than brand management. The people who work on this team are actually quite talented and work incredibly hard, but due to poor executive leadership and general industry-wide issues, absolutely nothing is organized in a professional manner. They've spent over a year implementing NetSuite and it's not even close to being ready to use. The culture is god awful. Leadership will continually try to blame issues on managers below them, who in turn blame everything on their direct reports. As I said there's a ridiculous number of management levels at this company and at the end of the day, everything falls on the lowest member on the totem pole. And if you think that person would at least be taken care of and compensated well enough? Boy are you wrong! They constantly fire people or switch members to different teams without any sort of warning. Oh and HR? They waited until there was like 100 people to hire anybody to manage HR and the people they chose are the most incompetent people imaginable. They're unresponsive almost all the time and pander to the CEO's immense ego rather than look out for the employees. The benefits suck, most everybody is underpaid, and they try to bribe you with "equity options" that worthless whenever one complains about their pay. Since the beginning of the year, people are dropping like flies and either leaving on their own accord or getting let go. The aggregator industry as a whole is struggling and Acquco represents everything wrong with this industry. If anybody is considering applying to or interviewing with or accepting an offer from this company, save your time and don't. You will be miserable every second that you work at this sinking ship of a company.