Believed in what Gooru could have been, but couldn't believe in the CEO.
Pros
While overall morale was low, the people I met and worked with were an amazing bunch, excluding management (which was the CEO and someone who now seems to have been rebranded as Co-Founder after the original Co-Founder left). My coworkers were from diverse backgrounds and were go-getters, and I could tell that people were genuinely devoted to creating a platform that could help many educators and students. I was very grateful to have been able to meet these people, a mix of former teachers, school administrators, recent college grads, and a smattering of other backgrounds. The company mission clearly attracted some inspirational people. Similarly, the idea of the product is fantastic - aggregating the world’s free education resources into one search engine so that all schools can take advantage of these resources was an exciting proposition; teachers need help preparing class lessons, and students enjoy using these web resources. But I think along the way, the CEO forgot who he was building this for - the students and the teachers, not his for his own ego. What turned people off constantly were the product decisions that didn’t make sense if you had the end-user as your priority.
Cons
It took me some time to realize a few things. 1) The CEO believes that if you want a work-life balance, you are "not dedicated to the mission." This is a terrible thing to believe (and unfortunately is not just isolated to Gooru in the Bay Area). The people I worked with were dedicated human beings who worked very hard and often late hours (for instance, to make calls with our engineering team in India), but in the end we are all HUMAN. We needed to be treated with far more empathy and it was clear that our health and well-being were not important. We were considered disposable labor. I would also argue that most of his employees were far more dedicated to the mission than he himself was, and that was the reason why everyone left - to find a place where they could create a product under someone who could make actual impact. One of the things the CEO seemed to adhere to was to hire people straight out of college. These people didn’t know what “real world” work was like and he could take advantage of that fact, working them hard with low pay and benefits, and they wouldn’t know to ask for better. If they burned out, then he could replace them with new people. Another example was how the CEO treated our overseas engineers in India. He would demand that they deliver a feature in a short deadline, expecting them to not sleep, and then change his mind after they had pulled a week of all-nighters without so much as a sorry, then turn around and ask for another feature and expect all-nighters again. Sure, the CEO loves to tout his phrase “Education is a human right,” but he didn’t seem to believe in good health for his own employees. 2) Product decisions were poor and many, if not all, of the Gooru product presentations were lies. Presentations or mockups were tweaked or filled with fake data so that it looked like we had a working, exciting product. I wish this weren’t true, but it was, and it would happen during presentations to potential partners and existing funders. The CEO would make promises to too many people and couldn’t end up fulfilling any of the promises because we didn’t have enough human power to build everything, and so the fake product presentations continued. It was frustrating. We all wanted Gooru to succeed, and yet here we were, constantly trying to fulfill these random promises the CEO made that were not improving the main, core product of Gooru, the reason we were all there. The CEO tried to take too many short cuts with the product and made too many promises that had nothing to do with the product. 3) On the surface, everyone was jovial, but when you spoke earnestly with everyone, there was clear dissatisfaction with management. People constantly left; at its peak, I believe Gooru was perhaps 40+ people, and at a quit rate of 5 or so people per month, that number quickly dwindled despite rapid hires. New hires would come and go. 4) Management likes to say fancy things, but doesn't take action. When employee turnaround was very high and there was clearly something wrong, management asked everyone to have an open discussion about what was going on. People were honest, possibly at the risk of losing their jobs. This happened multiple times, repeating every few months, and while management claimed to be taking everyone's words to heart, nothing changed. I remember thinking, this time it will finally change, they really heard everything! Unfortunately I was disappointed every time.
