Memrise Reviews

4.2

71% would recommend to a friend

(35 total reviews)

Edward Cooke

74% approve of CEO

48% positive business outlook

Memrise has an employee rating of 4.2 out of 5 stars, based on 35 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an excellent working experience there. The Memrise employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Education industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

35 reviews
2.0
12 Dec 2018

(At first) entertaining circus / asylum

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Some genuinely lovely people working there & most employees are pleasant to be around day-in day-out. Whilst there is room for improvement, the language content being taught (word / phrases) is actually great compared with other apps, which is a huge strength. Recent senior hires seem to be campaigning for positive change. Free language lessons are a great perk & give an insight into how best to teach languages (may be phased out so enquire if interviewing). Work-life balance is very reasonable & WFH requests are rarely denied if booked in advance. Generous training budget that people are encouraged to use. Current office location is great, as is the rooftop in warmer months. Mostly an alpha male-free environment. Free snacks, health insurance & the usual perks you'd expect to find. If nothing else, a good, easy stop-gap to tide people over / while making other plans / skilling-up. As an on-going social experiment / sitcom it can be very entertaining.

Cons

The product that houses this great content is frustratingly poor, owing to a steady roster of inexperienced, incapable, capricious & evasive chancers having been installed into product roles since time immemorial. Recurring negative themes- experiments run badly, changes made single-mindedly, meaningless company re-inventions each quarter, UX a minor concern, half-baked solutions / features / updates take an age to rollout then are left to fester, unforgivable bugs are flagged yet ignored. Few of the lovely folk are in leadership, where NPD & co-dependency are rife, with disastrous results where business decisions are concerned. People arrive with optimism, meet with despondency, then change position / team & repeat the cycle until they've had enough. Honesty ostensibly encouraged yet is punished, often by ignoring daring individuals who campaign for positive change while defensively over-promoting the views of strategically-aligned opportunists. Little empathy for the product's users- demanding money before giving users a chance to experience it while ignoring post-paywall bugs. Good people / ideas corrupted by atmospheric conditions. Advocacy yields to self-preservation. Lack of palpable career experience among leadership, lots of pride-driven ersatz loyalty. Counterproductively hands-on founders cannot handle critical feedback, no matter how constructive. Faddish miracle cures in book/TED form worshipped & inform strategy. Creepy employee feedback system plays out like a lazy pastiche of a Black Mirror episode. Fun or play in the work environment not encouraged. Distinct, forced-fun is. Leavers treated with distain while alarmed on-lookers take note. Formerly-productive tortured souls float around the office with nothing to do except build furniture & cover reception. When an article circulated (look up "secret life start up") that anonymously detailed life at another startup it was so close-to-the-bone that it gave people shivers.

avatar
Memrise Response
7y
Thanks for sharing your feedback. I'm really glad you found most Memrisers lovely and genuine, I too am proud of the kindness and empathy in those I work with and it's one of the many reasons I'm excited about the future. Constructive criticism of our product (and founders) is welcome, but personal attacks on our employees ("...owing to a steady roster of inexperienced, incapable, capricious & evasive chancers having been installed into product roles since time immemorial") are unfair and inaccurate. If those were true I very much doubt we would have experienced the growth we have over the last 8 years. We are proud of our team. It's a great shame that you have been left feeling this way on departing from the company. Unfortunately, it isn't unusual for those that join a business at this stage to feel the brunt of the chaos of scaling and for this to lead to them leaving during the transition period, having felt the pain but not yet the benefits of the many interconnecting changes that push us into an elevated way of operating. Your concerns are hard to read, but for the most part they are a regrettable but natural part of scaling at speed. The leap from scrappy start-up to post-series B scale-up is one of the most difficult challenges business' like ours face, and inevitably mistakes will be made. The only thing to do is hold your hands up and make sure to do better. As a new employee myself (3 months in) I can happily say I have seen huge improvements in the time I've been here; a revamped and refocused strategy focused on product quality and user happiness, an ambitious and clear vision communicated across the business, a commitment to 'being who we say we are' through focusing on employee morale and motivation and a real step-change in how we communicate with each other - putting honesty above optimism. Most of all I've been impressed by the will and determination of my colleagues to face our reality and drive forward positive change. That's why I won't be rebutting your concerns, but rather thanking you for your candid feedback, while lamenting that you weren't able to see what I see, which may have helped you through the frustration and out the other side with us. Wishing you all the best.
3.0
29 Oct 2019

Good Intentions, Poor Execution

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

-great culture, you won't find nicer people -flexible working hours/wfh policy -cool office environment: free food, musical instruments etc -easy to voice opinion (whether people regard it is another matter) -you will learn a lot about scaling

Cons

-said great culture also happens to be a con depending on your personality; lack of Type A individuals, especially at leadership level meaning although it is a startup it is lacking in pace. The product has fundamentally not changed enough over time -execution has been very poor despite great ideas amongst very smart colleagues -VC pressure has meant some fairly erratic business decisions - As for the founders, they are entrepreneurs, not ex-management so do not have a history of managing growing teams. As alluded to in a previous review, their skillset is probably no longer relevant at a company size of almost 100

1.0
26 Sept 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- The people are great - Nice office

Cons

- The CEO and COO are in way over their heads. It took until around q3 to get direction, and still nobody knows what direction we're heading in. - There's a lot of back-stabbing behaviour behind the scenes - Communication is poor - People are overworked, some of which was caused by redundancies earlier on in the year - You'll wait some weeks to hear back regarding a question, because other teams do not see the importance of what you're working on (no fault of their own, I think it's because of the lack of leadership)

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Memrise Response
6y
Thanks for sharing this feedback, tough though it is to hear, especially from a current employee.You are of course right: we are in over our heads, just as we have been on several occasions in the last couple of years. It is a fact of creating a company that grows fast, especially as a first time founder, that we find ourselves out of our experience zone at regular intervals. We make mistakes. What is crucially important to us and to the future of the company that we have devoted the last 9 years to building is how we respond to being "out of our depth". I cannot tell you how much we care about getting this right and how seriously we take it. We are much harsher judges of ourselves than you are of us.We need to learn as much as we can as fast as we can, and hire people to do the things that we can't do. This is what we've done in the past, adapting to the new challenges, learning what we can and hiring some superstars to help us (as you note, the people we've hired *are* great!)It sounds like right now we're not doing as good a job as you need us to. I'd like to change that. I know from feedback from others in the company that our efforts are paying off in some places. I'd like to think that we can help things work better for you too. I'd really appreciate your direct feedback. Message me any time. Of if you'd rather not talk to me (which I understand, of course) please talk to Claudia, Tirdad or Karima.Ben COO and Co-Founder
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Glassdoor has 42 Memrise reviews submitted anonymously by Memrise employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Memrise is right for you.