Great Talent Pool limited by horrible politics - Manager Audible Employee Review

I am the founder and CEO at Audible, and I first read this post some weeks ago while watching a World Cup match in the café on the 16th floor in our US headquarters in Newark. I recall looking around at the hundreds of other Audible employees in the large space and thinking that Audible celebrates just about every definition of diversity in real time. There were numerous rocket scientist-grade technologists of various stripes, former English majors, Newark-born paid interns who grew up in the urban core, gifted actors (we are the largest employer of actors in the NYC area), all of them arrayed across a diversity of age, gender, national or ethnic origin, seniority level and preferred national soccer team too. Earlier in the day at a department-wide meeting for the product and marketing teams, I viewed a rich and positively disruptive roadmap full of inventive new products alongside plans to proliferate them across numerous international locations. With Audible’s consistent success and growth comes the responsibility of serving the daily audio needs of millions of listeners around the world, but our missionary “soul of a start-up” spirit calls for cutting-edge new invention too. Just as I sense at our Hackathons, when I visit our many global centers, or when I share a beer with colleagues during Friday Happy Hours or after a game involving Audible sports teams, I sense an admixture of pride and excitement over our success and our substantial aspirations. This corroborates my feeling that Audible is defined by our mission, vision, mutual respect, and a will to do meaningful work together and have a lot fun while we’re at it. Yes, we have added to our mission the idea of helping the comeback of a great American city in Newark, and it saddens me that the writer of the post above didn’t take pride in our pursuit of social meaning and urban transformation beyond our fierce commitment to our customers. I believe our culture is far better for the presence of our paid Audible interns from Newark and our Newark-born Audible Scholars whom we support as college students and part-time employees, and finding ways to make this increasingly important aspect of our missionary culture meaningful to all of our employees is something we can always improve upon. One way or another, I would encourage anyone looking for a great place to work – particularly anyone who wants to be part of a company and set of products that change peoples’ lives – to check out Audible and judge us for themselves. We’re only a 19-minute ride from Penn Station in Manhattan, and we’d love to show you around. Email me at donkatz@audible.com, and we’ll set it up.