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Creative Destruction Lab

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Toxic cult-like work culture that's poorly managed. Avoid - Anonymous employee Creative Destruction Lab Employee Review

2.0
Aug 22, 2024
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Amazing colleagues across the network and you gain access to a great pool of start-ups and mentors.

Cons

Extremely toxic work culture of micromanagement that is led by arrogant leaders who don't listen to feedback. Extremely high turnover of staff and sites themselves. Constantly launching and opening new sites but then they often only have 2-3 year runway before running out of money and closing quietly, People get made redundant extremely regularly across the network as sites close with no effort made to re-hire good staff members to other sites. Self-congratulatory work culture - you can't give feedback as the senior leadership only want to hear how amazing CDL is. The work for both venture manager and operations staff is often repetitive and administrative, You will not get promoted here as they only people promoted are those that engross themselves into the cult work-culture.

Explore other reviews about Creative Destruction Lab

5.0
Oct 2, 2024
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- You are surrounded by high-potential startups and wildly successful entrepreneurs on a regular basis. The network-building potential is massive. - The organization has a constant desire to innovate and autonomy is provided to staff to do so. - The impact of your work is felt regularly in how you help bring revolutionary technology to market. - Access to great technology to help you do your job. - Inspiration and community for becoming an entrepreneur or investor.

Cons

- Fast moving and fast growing means some operational and scaling pains. Not unlike other companies but it's even harder to do within a university. - You have to be quite proactive about changing your responsibilities if you want to. It's easy to get settled in the cyclical nature of the program and get bored if you aren't contributing to the organization's growth. - Incentives can be difficult since sites are employed by their universities but are expected to abide by CDL Global's processes/initiatives. Performance management is a bit difficult because of it.

1.0
Oct 30, 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

They "help" startups for free, at least on the surface.

Cons

Creative Destruction lab is horrendously disorganized. The management are clowns, and are hostile to each other and to other companies. They enjoy wasting everybody's time with administrative bureaucracy. They have no respect for other people's time. Don't waste your time with Creative Destruction Lab. I especially feel terrible for all the startups's time they waste with highly antagonistic and hostile treatment.

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