Pros
Management is apparently not afraid to speak up in response to my prior rather critical review of the company's culture and practices.
Cons
Too bad they choose to lie in their response to try to smooth over the actual experiences of actual employees. So fine, I'll respond to your rebuttal, point. by. point: * FedTech is a privately held company. Equity is part of almost every W2 compensation package that the company offers. - Really? I was promised equity during interviews, during onboarding, and during my employment; yet by the time I left I had zero equity in the company. If you're so sure I got my equity, then I must have misplaced it under the sofa or something, weird. * We launched a 401k plan two months prior to your review with a 3.5% company match after as little as 9 months of employment. The plan is available to all full-time employees. - Forgot to mention the part where you deflected questions about 401K for over a year? Maybe so many employees left in response to the unkept promise that you finally decided to put the plan in place to avoid turnover costs. * Leadership team members do not raise their voices to current or former employees. Doing so would run contrary to our culture and our values. - Dude, Ben, own up man you're a big boy. The analyst you yelled at, that person and I are good friends, we've kept in touch after leaving your company and he told me about your temper tantrum episodes in vivid detail. Should I screenshot our convo and fax it to you? * The work that we do to accelerate the commercialization of Deep Tech on behalf of agencies (including NASA, VA, DOD, DOE, DHS, DOC, HHS) is vital to their missions and helps contribute to a better society. Our solutions leverage proprietary online learning resources, expert networks (coaches, mentors, advisors), and bootcamps to strengthen the viability of new ventures leveraging technology in support of these agencies. - Such wonderful corporate speak to deflect your problems. The "learning materials" and "resources" are just PowerPoints and PDFs of the top results from Googling "how to start a successful startup"; I even have the files as proof from when I used to work on those. * FedTech have helped launch 100s of new companies via our collaborations with agencies, including Canopy Aerospace via our work with NASA. FedTech supports veterans (and has many veterans on the team), engages veterans to participate in client programs (more than 82 veterans are program alumni), and we partner with DOD to provide transitional internships for veterans via the DOD Skillbridge Program. - This is true enough, you do "launch" a lot of startups, but how much value are you actually adding? The tech was developed by NASA, your playbook is just Google search results, and the founders are unpaid volunteers. The few good startups you work with are from the XTech program, but that's because those are EXISTING startups attracted to the prospect of working with the US Military, so where's your value add? You talk about helping startups with "market discovery" and finding "product market fit", but that just means cold calling corporate VPs on LinkedIn; you could literally outsource it to southeast Asia and have it done twice as well for a tenth of the cost you charge. New comments: How's your 0% turnover OKR doing? Every analyst who was my coworker at FedTech had left, why? Maybe it's because you paid us $50K or less during a year we helped you generate more than $3M in revenue; maybe because we're tired of helping you eat up the precious budget of NASA and Veteran's Affairs in exchange for PDFs cobbled together from five minutes of Googling. Maybe you've changed since I left, god I sure hope so, but refuting an ex-employee's complaints with corporate speak and straight up lies? Well... let's just say I'm not optimistic.
