Kanopi Reviews

• Inexperienced CEO and leadership, with a primary focus on doing more, in less time. This in itself is not unique or bad, but their inexperience showed through a constantly changing Way of Working approach. This appears to be mainly driven by reading articles and trying to keep up with the latest trends, but leadership are oblivious to team culture and the impact and wastage that constant changes cause. • Priority changes were also consistent, with little to no explanation, highlighting a lack of an overarching strategy from the top. • Lack of transparency and honesty about funding and "done" deals falling through, created a lot of uncertainty in the team • Micromanagement from the top with an apparent lack of trust in employees • Inability to manage such a small team well, should set off concerns if the company is to grow larger in the future

The problem at the core of this startup is its management. It's normal for a startup to move with the market, collect feedback and adapt accordingly, but the top managers make the process impossible. Consequently, after almost five years of development, the company built an unwanted product with no customers and a high staff turnover. The shortage of transparency from the top managers is part of the company culture. Another odd situation I have experienced was when the new hired CTO temporarily left the team. The news announced as a temporary situation on a Monday morning, was intended to be a temporary situation just for a couple of weeks, but in the end, it lasts for six months. During that period, the development team had to manage itself without knowing what was happening. The management was utterly unable to give directions to reorganise the dev team and transparently inform the current situation. After this stressful experience, some employees left the company. Finally, the lack of transparency is also in the employee stock ownership plan (ESOP), it's not clear the value of the shares and the procedure to get something of the vested options it's not clear and not well defined.