Narcissistic Culture - Failure in (near) Future - Anonymous employee Captora Employee Review

2.0
1 Sept 2016
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Unlimited PTO - Free Lunches Catered - Gym Membership - Great medical benefits - Stand up desks Overall, the product is great - but unable to hit the sales figures due to a confusing strategy

Cons

- Unlimited PTO is frowned upon when taken, so assume no PTO - Lunches keep you at your desk entire time - Have Gym membership but frowned upon when utilized - Medical Benefits, but unable to visit doctor during M-F as it's frowned upon Biggest Con of them all, the leadership of the CEO is going to doom the company to the ground. He is not a leader - he finds others to blame for his decisions / failures.

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Captora Response
9y
Thank you for your review - Captora makes it a priority to provide great benefits to our employees so we all work in a supportive environment. And our wonderful product is delivering record results across our family of customers. Captora's cultural norms as well documented and we strive to be 100% consistent with them; We are: 1) Driven to deliver superior results and an enduring impact that fuels winning 2) Demonstrate humility and lead in the spirit of service 3) Manic focus, discipline, & self-accountability; lead by example 4) Simplifies complexity instead of embracing it 5) Is an inspiring innovator, not a critic It's critical to live these tenets and to provide clarity through our weekly functional meetings, weekly company updates, and monthly all-hands. The results of our last company survey showed we have a strong culture and, like all companies, have room to improve and I take that very seriously. Our employee net promoter score was 37 and overall sentiment showed that the majority of employees said we have a very positive culture and they understand and support our vision, mission, and execution strategy. Blame is NOT part of Captora's culture, self-accountability IS; we are growing a great company together and if ANY of us don't live the above cultural norms, a 1:1 discussion will happen, and if not fixed, an employee that doesn't respect others will be asked to leave. We are fostering an honest, direct, and humble culture built on respect. I respect and care deeply for all employees and we embrace making mistakes and learning from them - that's where innovation comes from. All of us need to focus on results and not emotion or finger-pointing; if others fail, help them out and lean-in. Captora's Vision and associated strategy have not changed; however, we continually improve how we execute our strategy as Captora grows and moves into new markets (e.g., the Enterprise segment and international markets). What we are accomplishing is hard and all Captorians are sacrificing for the good of the company and each other. While we have plenty of challenges, our results are impressive - company revenues are more than doubling, renewals are solid (over 90% last quarter), and our products, as you said, are great. We should feel positive about our results while appreciating all of the hard work and dedication it takes to grow faster while scaling Captora. As we evolve and grow, I strive to inspire Captorians and believe in focusing on the positive, at the same time I acknowledge our "failures" through learning and improving our future actions; and by making sometimes difficult decisions in how we approach our business and with the people who are helping us beat our goals. I encourage all of Captorians to share their views (directly or anonymously), be accountable, live our values and be a positive contributor to our successful future! Thank you, Paul

Explore other reviews about Captora

5.0
6 Sept 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Best Application to work with, nice environment

Cons

Work Load, Complex Project, Salary

1.0
21 Nov 2016
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

~ Interesting product concept (if it could actually be executed upon) ~ Free lunches ~ Some founders appear to have since departed, which may have helped fix most severe leadership issues

Cons

Product Issues: ~ Product that was being sold by the sales team did not have the core capabilities that were promised to customers. ~ Customers needs and requests frequently ignored by senior product leaders, who preferred to implement features that were not requested while ignoring ones that would actually serve the market. ~ No process / best practices for developing and delivering an enterprise-quality product to market ~ Customers rarely informed of product changes or the larger roadmap, leading to great confusion when new features were released without notice or system "updates" would change Leadership Issues: ~ Founders did not share a common vision and frequently worked at odds with one another. ~ Senior staff had almost no communication with the team, even though everyone worked in one large room together for most of the first 2 years. ~ Micromanagement of product features by founders and constant changing of the product direction on a daily / weekly basis ~ based on the next great idea led to a shambolic product and frequent rework or redo's. ~ CEO out of touch with what was happening with the company and the product and did not express interest in listening to staff about it - his focus seemed to be solely on sales. ~ Pettiness among some senior staff who spread falsehoods and some outright lies about other staff members.

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Captora Response
9y
Thank you for your review. While it seems a bit dated we, as a company, value and appreciate any feedback as an opportunity to get better in our quest to build the next generation SaaS company. I joined Captora a little over 18 months ago to lead its engineering team and it has been quite a ride. There is a new team in place covering all functional areas of a modern SaaS company including development, dev ops, quality assurance, technical publications, UX and design, and technical support. There is also a new engineering leadership team bringing experience from premier Silicon Valley companies both startups and large corporations. Engineering staff is nothing short of awesome. We work hard but we also work smart, we argue, we choose the best path forward and we get behind it and execute with great precision. Our culture is based on trust, transparency, and direct communications and we have been blessed with similarly minded team members that we keep finding and hiring. Captora was launched around a vision of a digital platform for the top of the marketing funnel and in the past 18 months the product has come a long way from V1, focused primarily on market fit, to V3, enterprise ready and featuring 99.99% uptime. We are now releasing new features every two weeks with zero downtime during deployments. We have a pipeline of patents and a flow of innovations that we can add to a solid product base created thus far. We have been successful staying true to our vision while balancing customer requirements and engineering creativity. As a member of an executive team I spend a lot of my time communicating the vision both internally and externally and translating it into product specifics. And the customers respond well through buying, renewing, and staying engaged. I am sorry that your experience at Captora was less than stellar and while I cannot attest to how it was two or three years ago, Captora is a very different place today from what your review describes.
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