A Nightmare - Producer Lemonada Media Employee Review

Lemonada is a great, well-resourced audio production Company. The main benefit of working there is the wealth of knowledge held by their full-time staff. Great teams of audio folks who love to skill-share.

They dangled a fulltime job / further work in front of me as I produced a very successful season of a podcast for them. But they never had space to take me on for further work after all. This happens a lot with contracting in audio, and it's a shame!

Lemonada hires truly incredible people. The teams you work with day to day are smart, creative, kind and supportive. You get to collaborate directly with some of the most talented individuals in the industry, and that is the best part of working here.

Unfortunately, everything beyond your immediate colleagues is a bait and switch. The CEO, Jessica Cordova Kramer, is extremely toxic, and the team of executives around her are too afraid to push back and are punished if they do. There is no true HR to protect employees. Talented people are routinely pushed out, either because the CEO drives them to burnout or because of hair-trigger layoffs. This pattern extends outside the company too. Hosts, talent, and their teams are also misled by the company’s supposed values and promises of support and success. The irony of their tagline “make life suck less” is hard to ignore because the reality is the opposite. Working here often makes life suck more because of the toxic management. The most confusing part is Stephanie Wittels Wachs. She comes across as a good person on the surface but seems comfortable letting her partner Jessica run the company into the ground. Unless major changes are made up top, it feels like Lemonada has maybe one to two years before it collapses.