Pros
Product is pretty solid compared to others in the market. The base comp can be good. Although the executive team often lists unrealistic sales goals which everyones bonus plan is tied too and those goals are hardly ever exceeded and sometimes not even met so nobody get's a bonus. The sales goals seem pretty baseless as well, and feel like they just come up with a number at random to try and achieve. The CEO also doesn't believe in any sort of marketing and lead gen spend (besides very marginal, bare minimum campaigns) and even got rid of the marketing team a few years back; yet expects higher and higher new biz numbers each quarter with no actual plan or changes on how to achieve it beyond hoping a very small number of enterprise accounts close. The company has a training and development partner that they let everyone take classes with (which historically was only for those in leader roles) so that was cool to take advantage of. Pretty generous with budget on food, activities, hackathons, professional development, happy hours, and such. If you're an engineer who wants to keep your head down and focus on your tasks; you'd probably be fine here. Any other role, I'd say good luck!
Cons
Most people here are in a bubble. They've been at Zello for so long and don't fully understand the greater industry around them which causes them to fall behind or just plain not have the knowledge to make the calculated business decisions in order to be a major player for what we do. A lot of the individuals in leadership positions seem to be playing "house" with a company, and do things they think are important, but those things are often just busy work with no actual impact. Not many people here are modern business professionals with the ability to help propel the organization to the next level and hardly any of them are actually present in the startup community or even local community for that matter. The internal tools, processes, and knowledge sharing are an absolute mess, and the only people that actually know how things work are those with deep levels of institutional knowledge. We even have a few members at the executive level that flat out don't know how the product works, how some processes work, and the history behind some of the features and roadmap items. A lot of the processes are so junk (and everyone knows they are) but if you want to change anything you're tasked with creating a massive project report with data, and form an insane committee to even get permission to test your ideas. You can't have this and expect to be a fast paced software organization. It takes way too long to do anything and there's so much red tape. They would rather leave a broken or difficult process in place than actually put in the work to fix it. The CEO recently took over the oversight of revenue; which is absolutely wild considering that he has a strict technical background and flat out doesn't see value in having a marketing team. He also relies heavily on converting a massive amount of free trials into paying customers, yet still wants the company to somehow achieve being an enterprise level tool. The CEO is a brilliant technical mind, no question about that; but it reflects poorly on his leadership ability that he doesn't give other people in his organization the tools to succeed, then when they don't, then he pushes them aside and tries to run their function himself. It seems like anyone that challenges the status quo or tries to implement a new idea gets shut down. The CEO also gave a really threatening speech over the summer last year about the company falling behind on revenue goals (which I know, shocker without any marketing), and reaffirmed the organization that layoffs weren't being considered. Over the course of the next few months there were tons of random exits that weren't really well addressed and we were all told were that those people were leaving at will or it was performance related and that just simply wasn't true. They had even dismissed our previous technical recruiter during the hiring freeze only to reopen a technical recruiter role a few months later hahaha it's like they just don't really think too far ahead. I'm sure some of the people that left were performance reasons, but there were multiple people in mid or senior leadership that jumped ship as well and that's just not a good sign.. And now even into 2025, we actually did have formal layoffs. So I wouldn't recommend anyone work here unless they want to look over their shoulder in fear every week...