A company plagued with issues
Pros
Senior leaders within the company had managed to hire great talent to build their teams. Unfortunately, they have all left. The company has benefited from great publicity, and an incredible amount of funding considering they have next to no revenue
Cons
Most if not all of the problems within Swyft stem from the CEO. He is emotional, irrational, deceitful, and untruthful to investors, employees, his co-founders, and himself. What he does have going for him is that he is excellent at spinning a web of believable lies (read: attracting investors), which is also what plagues the company. He doesn't know when to reign it in and starts to believe his own delusions. The CEO changes the product every single week. Every day is a new "radical idea" and the engineering team can never complete something because they're always sprint planning. Volumes declined over the course of the year and the CEO continued to fire people in order to brush off and reassign blame. The entire senior leadership team has either been fired of has quit, including two co-founders. The entire sales team has been turned-over twice. People have been openly mocked in the office for crying during their termination calls. The CEO recently asked the marketplace team to launch a "nice looking facility" so that he could walk the investors in LA through and impress them and that they could "just shut it down the next day". He also asked the head of sales to have the sales team make purchases from customers in order to boost delivery volume. If that isn’t blatant fraud I don’t know what is. He shipped his car to LA using company money, takes personal flights (and pays for the flights of others) using company money, when he arrived in LA he rented a Range Rover until his car arrived, with, you guessed it, company money. He is more concerned about finding girls and boasting about it to other employees in the LA office than doing any work. He doesn't have the discipline, integrity, mental fortitude, or maturity to be running a company. He has rested on the laurels of his co-founders and senior team to increase his own personal value in the eyes of investors. Now that they've all left, I'd be curious to see what happens. Unfortunately for the CEO, he's surrounded himself with advisors that enable his behaviour, they are complicit in the activity that goes on within the company. I have never seen this in my career but last week the CEO offered everyone in the company $5,000 to leave within two weeks. At this point nothing should surprise me but this company really is the gift that keeps on giving.
