Recent downhill turn - Anonymous employee Clyde Employee Review

When I joined Clyde, I thought I was getting in on the ground floor of a company that was going places. However behind the appearance of a fast-growing tech start up, there is incompetency stemming from the C-levels down. They can't retain good talent, meanwhile bad hires fly under the radar because they're tight with leadership. The culture is really volatile. C-levels are young and super inexperienced. First time founders, first time C-suite across the board. The CEO and CTO are both founders who are product guys. They became defacto leaders, despite a lack of experience. CEO is a nice enough person, but would be better for a Head of Product role. Senior leadership are too congenial with employees, which leads to bad behavior not getting addressed. Lots of nepotism in the workplace. Leadership goes out drinking with select employees on a regular basis. I heard the CEO was the guy handing out shots at a sales kick off. The culture is really poor. When something happens that goes against employee code of conduct, it is seldom addressed. Before we had our current HR rep, the COO (also a founder, no actual HR background or certifications) did half-hearted "investigations" where he purposefully did not ask relevant questions. In the last couple months, any bit of company culture they did have, has gone way downhill. There was a mass firing, aka "reduction in force" in April that cut 30% of the entire company. Just a month earlier, they rolled out a very expensive rebrand with a huge website rebuild, new logo, a "theme song", a hype reel, etc- all of which they paid an outside studio a bunch of cash to build. Around the same time, they took a President's Club trip to a beach resort in Mexico with at least 20+ people. In the mass firing, every department was affected. Didn't matter how big or small. CEO and CFO knew it was coming for over a month, but did not put a freeze on hiring and squeezed as much work as they could out of their staff before they laid them off with a paltry severance package. COO basically told employees who had been let go to "take it or leave it". They started removing employees from Slack and taking them offline before they were even fired. It was chaotic and disorganized. Most of the people who were let go are remote, while those who work from the NYC office and have made pals with the CFO/ CEO were kept safe. You can't call your company a "remote-first org" if the remote team are the first people you cut. The 60-70% of employees who remain are all under enormous pressure, and many (especially young "director level" types) are taking it out on their colleagues or other departments around them. Sad to say it's become a toxic work environment. I've spoken with countless coworkers who are being met with hostility by peers. One coworker I spoke with said "it feels like everyone is fighting". The condescending emails and slack messages are just the tip of the iceberg. Cameras are rarely on in video calls, even if it is just a 1 to 1. Pushback when you ask for help from another department is almost always the response. Apathy is commonplace. Lots of scapegoating. We used to have a really awesome DEI committee made up of employees who have all since left. Most were people of color. There is a relatively new HR guy and actually, I feel for him. He is the only person who appears to care about how bad the culture is, but his boss (the COO) is missing in action and not trained in HR. Based on observations, I suspect HR rep is not being supported as much as he should by senior leadership. The work environment is very clique-y and unfriendly, unless a select few decide they like you. To make matters worse, the clique-y bunch queen bees (all are white) are higher-up people managers, who are friendly with the CEO/ CFO (and their girlfriends). C-suite leadership is part of the clique. Unless you're a New York based millennial white woman who's good at winning over the mean girls, I wouldn't recommend working here.