Where to begin.
The culture is textbook psychological safety theatre. Leadership will confidently tell you one thing in a 1:1, deny it ever happened in the next all-hands, and somehow make you feel like *you* misunderstood. If you've heard the word 'gaslighting' and wondered what it looks like at an organizational scale - spend a quarter here.
The CEO has gone from founder-energy to founder-ego. What started as vision has quietly become a need to be the smartest person in every room, whether or not they are. Pushback - even well-reasoned, data-backed pushback - is received as a loyalty test you just failed. Sycophancy is rewarded. Substance is tolerated at best.
If you're expecting a safe escalation path, recalibrate. HR operates closer to reputation management for leadership than actual people advocacy. Raises concerns at your own risk.
The GTM situation deserves its own paragraph. Strategy is being driven by someone from a finance background with no discernible go-to-market intuition - no narrative coherence, no ICP clarity, no original thinking. Playbooks are lifted wholesale from competitors and repackaged as vision. Sales and marketing teams are left executing a strategy that nobody can explain top-to-bottom because nobody built it top-to-bottom.
The result is a lot of motion, very little momentum