Strong Product, Unstable Leadership and Culture - Anonymous employee CB Insights Employee Review

Fantastic culture. It's a fairly laid back environment with great people who treat everyone as their equal. As the office manager, I felt valued and appreciated by the executive team as much as individual contributors. I can't say enough about the culture. They encourage you to try things. Mistakes are not things you tend to get in trouble for, but instead learn from. Failures mean you're taking risks and that's meaningful to them, Benefits were good, PTO started at 15 days and went up from there. After 4 years I had close to 30 days of PTO. They don't roll much over - they want you to take your time off, and they don't expect you to pick up your phone or respond to email while you're off. I was laid off when they committed to a more remote focused model. As the office manage, that cut my role significantly.

They don't always have consistent processes and procedures across the org, which for the office manager can be maddening, since I often had to sync between multiple teams doing things differently. No job is perfect, but I'd rather work for a place with some frustrating process systems than a negative work environment.

Interesting product, plenty of opportunities to learn, and smart people who work hard.

CB Insights was founded over 15 years ago, yet prides itself on still having a “startup culture.” In some ways that energy is great, but at some point it crosses into arrested development. The company is still searching for how best to frame its value proposition and strategy. And while it’s always moving at 100mph to solve this, too often it feels like running in circles rather than moving forward. For a company with this much tenure, you’d expect the basics to be figured out, but you also see the same frenetic, “flying by the seat of our pants” energy when it comes to managing their employees. With the outcome being significant voluntary churn on top of involuntary layoffs. As results and headcount have trended down, the company has also lost much of the culture that once made it renowned as a great place to work. And if you don’t take my word for it, just look here on Glassdoor: the rating has steadily declined, and the company hasn’t received a 5-star review in over a year.