Braintrust Reviews

Perhaps it's because it's fully remote, but there's not much of a culture within the business. There are values, and time is paid during each all hands to call out people for fulfilling them in various ways, but it all felt very need-to-know and sterile during my time there; no real focus on getting to know the people you work with other than these weekly all-hands where 5 people talk and 35 strangers stare at each other. My experience was that it was a weird confederacy of teams as opposed to an actual company. It's siloed and information sharing is limited, however there is a desire to micromanage. The means of communication is also very strange. The default is to not have meetings and instead have discourse occur through Google doc comments. This leads to just tons and tons of back and forth with limited decision-making. The executive team is unwilling to put resources towards building the product or truly investing in the marketing function, and there's a consistent default to using contractor labor, which can leave some teams without a ton of institutional knowledge. The founders of the company have no real interest in the freelance community they need to operate the platform. For them, this is an economic experiment using a token to incentivize the community to work for something other than USD as often as possible.

Poor onboarding handled using a google doc with a bunch of links. Almost nonexistent synchronous communication and follow-up on understanding the basics. 90% asynchronous communication using google docs comments as "Slack is too noisy". Love to look into other networks for talent and client "attraction". Trashing competition in meetings instead of learning what the competition does well and figuring out how to differentiate. Decisions are often made ahead of investigating viable paths and angles. The idea of weekly internal all-hands syncs is great, however, somehow it often turned into self-praise sessions without real progress seen on the ground. Lots of repackaging of old stuff just to show "progress". Unusual ways of making talent do the work the organization should.