Pulley Reviews

To say this place is chaotic would be flattery at this point. This is a place run on fear. New hires either go through 6-8 interview stages + a take home assignment while Grant Oladipo (the COO) and Yin Wu (CEO) will hire their friends with 0 interview steps. Grant (COO) and Yin Wu (CEO) have a good cop, bad cop approach. Yin Wu loves exploiting people's fear about the economy and it's apparent why no one will provide alternate ideas or challenge her. Why would anyone want to challenge her if she can fire them or eviscerate them on slack or a company wide zoom call? She prefers hiring Ivy League alums, even if their experience is lackluster compared to other candidates. If you look at former employees of Pulley, you'll see many people who were replaced after just 2-5 months, often with a new hire in that same role (most likely to be replaced soon). That tells you how good they are with hiring in the first place. They even rescind offers for little to no reason at all after people have given notice. Grant Oladipo is nice, but he is always missing or unresponsive for days or weeks at a time. These two have time for posting on LinkedIn, but don't ever respond to their own employees slack messages, emails, or team. They want us to be responsive on slack within a few minutes, but will be missing themselves for days at a time. It's clear leadership is simply looking for someone at the bottom to drive 3-5x growth somehow, because they themselves don't have many ideas outside of small incremental changes. This is one of those run of the mill, hyperpolitical, small startups.

-CEO is needlessly intimidating, no one will challenge her, she may talk fast and she is convinced she is always right about 99% of the time. She knows the current environment so very few will speak up and challenge. Even if it holds back the teams. She clearly lacks trust to delegate and let others lead. That approach may work for a small early company, but not for a high growth startup. -Teammates seem to replace each other all the time. A new hire to work alongside you in the team (even in a different focus) likely means you'll compete for favor then the loser gets cut/let-go. -CEO ruthlessly picks favorites fast (just like other reviews state). She'll respond to these employees fast, give thoughtful responses, etc. Everyone else? Not so much. -I watched dozens of my colleagues get let go in two waves, it was not acknowledge the first time, it was barely acknowledged the second. Most of these people were coming up on 1-year or had their first vacations coming up. So be careful about using PTO or if you're nearing 1-2 year marks. -Direction is changing all the time, there is a core product that is growing pretty well, but lots of tone of uncertainty and thin ice with this company. A priority 1 new hire from a few months ago might get cut a few months later. -I got to peer interview some candidates at companies that were growing at 10x-15x the rate of Pulley, we'd still decline them. They were more capable than me, but probably more expensive. Instead, I got to take on more work.