READ BEFORE YOU ACCEPT A POSITION - Anonymous employee Gopuff Employee Review

I spent a decent portion of my career around upstart businesses. Growing pains, missteps, and all that goes along with building a brand from the ground up. GoPuff, though, stands out. When I first joined GP, we were promised the world, and hey who wouldn’t believe it? The company was seeing record profits, investors were clamoring to Gopuff’s doorstep, and whispers of the company going public were abound in the corporate world. When I joined it was everything I thought it would be - fast paced, exciting, and challenging. We thought were building the next cornerstone of world e-commerce. We thought we got our foot into apple or Amazon before the rocket took off. We were proud. The long hours came easy knowing that in the years to come, the brand that we built would reward us handsomely. This, though, was tragically far from the truth. My time there flew by; it seemed as though every week a new vertical would seemingly appear out of thin air. Pharmacy, liquor, distribution centers, fresh food, food trucks, an independent goods brand. Eventually it all seemed like too much. The brand, which had started out as a good idea, executed by a tight group of hardworking people had seemingly lost its way. What really started to weigh on me was the companies aggressive hiring practices. GoPuff pulled in talent from seemingly everywhere. I mean really highly regarded men and women from every sector of the professional world. New positions were created daily and the company slowly began changing from an organization of cooks, to one of chefs. As someone who’s been around start ups, I could see that this burden would soon weigh on the company. There were too many idea people and not enough “working” employees to execute on the grandiose fantasies of these many individuals. At this point the dominos had been set, all that needed to happen was for the first to topple. This came quickly, and not so unexpectedly when the pandemic ended. The hyper inflated instant delivery market, already wrought with competition, dries up. Gopuff’s struggling outposts, outside of major metro markets go bust. This triggers an internal response in the company to shed fat; so the new wings of the business are canceled. As entire departments are gutted, so are the employees. This, though, is not enough, GoPuff has to self-immolate if it wants to keep investors on the hook. Mass layoffs and abandoning established fulfillment centers is what needed to happen to right the ship. So it does. Thousands of hardworking employees are terminated without warning. A one way video conference, firing entire departments at a clip does the trick. Employees who wish to receive compensation packages must sign NDAs, and they do. The company, a shell of its former self lives on life support. Desperately grasping at what profitable business it still has, GoPuff lives on, only as long as the investors allow it. They too are looking for a way out. What will happen to Gopuff is still a question up for debate. The business was grown in such an inorganic way, that there may be no way of recouping the losses incurred during the pandemic spending spree. Only if gopuff gets back to its roots will it ever succeed, the only question left, is it too late?