Disclaimer
This section reflects my personal experience and perspective as a former employee. I did not have had full visibility into all executive, financial, or operational decisions, and my interpretation is most certainly incomplete or wrong in some areas. However, this is an honest account of what I directly experienced, observed, and understood during my time at the company.
Compensation trust, payroll reliability, and financial concerns
While the compensation structure appears attractive on paper, my experience did not always align with that expectation. I personally observed situations where commission outcomes did not always match the terms or expectations set at the time of closing, including instances where payout structures were adjusted after deals were signed, which created confusion and a lack of trust in consistency.
In addition, I personally experienced payroll processing delays / bounced checks during my tenure, which further impacted confidence in compensation reliability. Regardless of cause, this created concern for me as payroll consistency is foundational to employee trust.
I also experienced issues related to retirement (401k) contributions being deducted from my pay but not reflected in my account, which required escalation and ultimately led me to needing outside legal council to resolve. For me, this was one of the most serious breakdowns in trust during my time at the company.
I also observed broader financial pressure signals during my tenure, including internal discussions around restructuring and liquidity management. I saw vendor payments that appeared significantly delayed, which in some cases seemed to impact ongoing service delivery and support for active client contracts. I also observed publicly visible information and restructuring activity involving company real estate assets you can google, which contributed to concerns about financial stability. There was also leadership turnover during this period, including CFO-level changes, which added to a broader sense of instability.
High-pressure culture and employee turnover
The sales organization in particular experienced high turnover. In my experience, many employees in SDR and AE roles did not remain long-term, and average tenure in sales roles felt relatively short.
Hiring classes were typically 20+ people, and there was a recurring internal joke across teams about how few people remained from each onboarding group after a year. It was commonly joked that only 1–2 people from a class were still around after a year or so, which became a shorthand reference point for how quickly turnover occurred.
This environment was paired with a fully in-office, highly structured, and performance-driven culture. Employees were required to wear business professional attire (including suit and tie), which reinforced a very image-forward, high-discipline culture.
From my perspective, this created a high-pressure, highly monitored environment that emphasized appearance and intensity, with limited flexibility compared to more modern hybrid workplaces.
Sales expectations, OTE reality, and career progression
While compensation potential is positioned as a major upside, my experience was that OTE functioned more as a theoretical target than a realistic outcome for most employees. From what I observed across the organization, quota attainment appeared to be extremely limited, with only a single-digit number of individuals across a 100+ person sales organization (spanning SDRs, AEs, and even regional leadership roles) consistently achieving quota.
This created a significant gap between the compensation narrative presented during recruiting and what was realistically achievable in practice for most employees. In my experience, success was heavily concentrated among a very small group of top performers, while the majority of the organization did not consistently reach target performance levels.
This disconnect was further reinforced by long sales cycles, high expectations, and relatively short average tenure in go-to-market roles, which made sustained success difficult for many employees despite strong effort.
In parallel, SDRs were consistently told there is a path into AE roles, but in practice that progression was rarely realized. I did not see meaningful examples of SDRs moving up during my tenure, and most seemed to cycle through the role relatively quickly. This created a gap between what was communicated during hiring and what actually happened, making advancement feel less attainable than it was presented to be.
Sales process vs delivery readiness gap
One of the most consistent challenges I observed was a disconnect between what was being sold and the organization’s ability to immediately deliver on those commitments.
In a leadership or team setting, I was told directly in a meeting that client churn was approximately ~70%, with expectations that this could increase going into 2026. I cannot verify those figures independently, but that statement contributed to my concern about alignment between sales expectations and delivery outcomes.
In practice, it often felt like deals were being agreed to during the sales process with confidence that the organization would “figure it out afterward,” with delivery teams then responsible for building or scaling support after contracts were already signed.
From my perspective, this created ongoing strain on internal teams and contributed to inconsistent execution, as well as challenges in meeting the expectations that had been set during the sales process.
Additionally, I observed that there appeared to be a strong emphasis on projecting success, scale, and capability in client-facing environments. In certain facilities such as the SOC/DOT, I noticed staffing that included a mix of security and non-security roles, which at times created the appearance of a larger or more specialized operational footprint during tours and walkthroughs than what functionally reflected day-to-day operations.
