Founders hold back team from potential opportunity - Anonymous employee Kayako Employee Review

3.0
29 Dec 2016
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

They try very hard to be transparent, and have an employee focused stock option plan. Offices are well taken care of by great office managers (good food, comforts of home). They have big dreams, and want to do something cool. There's a lot of emphasis on learning. You'll work with a lot of smart people. Short term, you'll probably learn tons, even if it feels like you're slamming your head against a brick wall.

Cons

Founders set unrealistic goals, but don't have the expertise or willingness to work to achieve them. When targets aren't hit, it's never their fault, and blame goes to the team they hired. Two big layoffs (20% + of the company each time) in two years. Company is encouraged to "future sell" to themselves (ie. think about how great it will be when this is released!), and anyone who talks about how things are in reality is talked about negatively, or let go. They will probably reply to this post by copy pasting the same response about "Open Book Management" whatever that means... but seriously, it's because they don't know how to hire, train and manage their existing team.

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Kayako Response
9y
Thank you for taking the time to share your feedback and I'm glad you managed to learn a lot during your role and have given us a positive outlook 👍. We'll definitely take your feedback on board with regards to getting better at hiring and managing. As we grow and iterate we know we need to throw out everything we thought we knew or that worked last year and relearn it the next (hence the big emphasis on learning..!). For the benefit of anyone else reading, I'll clarify that we haven't had "two big layoffs" at Kayako. In November 2016 we unfortunately did let go of around 20% of the team. A large number of those individuals were in sales, because the function was no longer working for Kayako. For the others, I won't discuss the reasons publicly out of respect for those individuals. Finally, here's a great resource on "Open Book Management" - http://www.greatgame.com/about/the-origin-of-open-book-management - which is what we're striving to practice at Kayako. Jamie - Co-founder

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