Kira Learning Reviews

Overall, I had some fond memories of working here and learned a lot, but like another reviewer, my mental health suffered. I didn't realize how toxic the situation had been until months after I left. I am now at a similarly funded company and just realizing how dysfunctional Kira had been. 1) Founders were "nice" enough during my limited interactions with them, but I always came away feeling manipulated by the end of conversations. I noticed a lot of questionable behaviors as well. For instance, I felt very pressured to keep working by leadership's messaging and reactions when I asked for vacations. There were very passive aggressive remarks directed towards specific people in public forums such as Slack that seemed to me like they were meant to paint someone in an incompetent light. 2) Constant turnover. I'd say probably 50% during my time there including senior leadership, which is well and above the normal rate for a company of this stage and funding. Almost everyone who left did so voluntarily because they didn't like the environment, and some of them came from or ended up going to similar staged startups. 3) Some of the more positive reviews say that shifting priorities are just innate to being at a startup. While this is true, at my previous and current job, the shifts were simply handled better and with respect for employees' time and efforts and mental health. At Kira, it was very sudden and oftentimes poorly communicated. 4) Bad leadership. For a while I tried to excuse leadership flaws with the idea that they needed time to grow into their roles but the reality is that I've seen far younger leadership teams handle things with more maturity and emotional regulation than Kira's. Leadership mistakes verbosity for transparency, manipulation for motivation, and constructive criticism for hostility. In addition, they are not good at anticipating product or customer needs, despite the rest of the company constantly alerting them to it. They on one had do not listen to customer pain points, and on the other have knee jerk reactions when a pain point becomes too difficult to ignore. 5) Benefits and compensation kind of suck, depending on your role. I interviewed with other companies before and after leaving and was offered multiple jobs from similar staged companies that had at least ~15% higher salary, better equity options, and better benefits. Do your research and reach out to former employees and decide if this is the environment you want. There are good parts to working here, but I feel like you can find that in other places too.