Expanse Reviews

*My review was originally removed by the company, which is the epitome of irony because Expanse claims to pride itself on transparency and feedback. I’ve adjusted it to see if the company will allow this review to stand.* Unfortunately, the negative reviews of this company are the real truth. Working at Expanse has been the worst chapter of my professional career so far. It is a constant battle with anxiety, fear, and smiling through others’ unprofessional behavior in the hopes that I can avoid any type of confrontation. Leadership selectively chooses who is taken seriously (and 8 times out of 10, they choose fellow men) and yelling in meetings occurs at all levels. There are departments within the company that run smoothly and have experienced, calm, mature managers; however, the majority of the company is in a state of unhealthy stress and concern regarding the status of their jobs, and when they look to guidance from their managers they are met with inexperience and rudeness. There is absolutely no job security and minor mistakes are not forgiven, nor are they forgotten. I personally have had one error - which was quickly corrected - brought up by my manager for weeks on end, which has had an irreparable impact on my confidence. Verbal harassment is a regular occurrence and is brushed aside, ignored, and treated like it’s “no big deal” by leadership...but, what can you expect when one of the VPs wears a tee shirt that says “There once was a man from Nantucket” (if you don’t know that limerick, just know that it is disgusting and has no place being brought up in an office). Female employees cry in the bathroom on a daily basis as a result of how they are spoken to in meetings: cut off mid-sentence, not listened to, and told that their tangible results are never good enough. Sexism is both inter- and intra-gender: one woman in a leadership position went out of her way to mock and belittle women on her team in meetings. When I’ve interviewed at other companies, I don’t know what to say other than “My current company is toxic and I need to get out.” At Expanse, it is impossible to be a part of the “cool crowd” and get promoted if you didn’t go to Stanford. The company’s products and mission are interesting and important, but about 80% of employees are terrified that one mistake will cause them to be terminated. If you’re an IC, your voice and input do not matter. This is no way to exist day-to-day. It’s sad that this type of work environment exists today.

I worked at Expanse and was a member of the nearly entire marketing team that got laid off a few weeks after the pandemic started, a few weeks after the CEO seemed genuine in an all-hands meeting when he shared with us that the company wouldn’t lay off a single employee. Surprised to see another review post here written by a current employee that inaccurately attributed the lay-offs to being performance related. Clearly, they don't work directly with the CEO and HR. When I asked the HR representative about why I was being let go, she assured me (and then re-assured me) that it wasn’t team or personal performance-related. It was a change in direction for the company, she said. And my understanding from the CEO's communication was that the marketing team was a mis-match for the stage of company Expanse is at. He called nearly 10 marketers with great expertise putting start-up, small and mid-sized companies on the map "big company" marketers. Maybe he was confused by the fact that the companies many of these marketers helped build are actually big now. We’ll never know. Bad reviews come when you don’t value your employees and the people that helped take your company to new heights. In my time there, what I witnessed was that Expanse got a high-performance marketing team that the CEO and an immature sales leader didn’t ultimately appreciate, nor did they care to understand the machine that was being built. Oddly though, the CEO would tell us how much he did appreciate our work and then suddenly the pandemic hit and he laid us all off. What the leaders at Expanse also had for a time was a mature and integral adult in the C-suite who called out bad behavior in the ranks, and as far too often happens in Silicon Valley, paid a price for it. One male executive at Expanse has a reputation of being a bully, particularly to women. The CEO knows this. Two women I worked with also shared their stories with me about their abusive encounters with this male executive. After spending time with him and the CEO, I was honestly relieved to be let go. These are the kinds of leaders who talk more than listen and think they know more about how to do everyone else’s jobs than the SMEs. They are also the kinds of fearful and insecure leaders that need to constantly criticize and tear people down in order to lift themselves up. It’s something you eventually become immune to in the course of a career in tech. ­­­If you want to build up your pain tolerance threshold and immunity to working under that kind of leadership, Expanse is definitely a place where you should spend some time. The CEO has a lot of growth work of his own to do if he hopes to truly expand Expanse in healthy ways and take the company to its full potential.