CompStak

2.0

11 Nov 2021

Recommend

CEO approval

Business outlook

Pros

You will find some nice and smart people to work with. Office culture was generally good with most of the staff being nice and caring people. Engineering work is rather meticulous (because of crowdsourced data being difficult and messy), but generally easy because they have no problems that require much scale. The product is succeeding because some people are burning themselves out, but there's a healthy amount of people who are putting in minimum effort, like the CTO, so you could be one of those people.

Cons

Pay is below market for anyone even slightly senior. Dogs running amok in the office were celebrated. (Maybe not a con for you, but there was no consideration for folks who didn't want to be interrupted by dogs going into or out of the conference rooms or begging for food or running around crazy because another dog came into the office. Every day.) Many poor engineering decisions have left them several years behind where the industry is going. When I left there was no hint of any of Docker / Golang / Rust / Kotlin / Kubernetes / Nomad / etc. Frontend might be less stagnant. The rallying cry of "We'll disrupt the commercial real estate industry!" gave way to becoming yet another data vendor making money off of huge landlords and not helping small landlords nor tenants. Too many *New York City* landlords can't afford the rather high prices CompStak wants to charge. CTO is a macho bro man-baby, and really checked out except for when he shows up to crack the whip and intimidate people. We kept track and there was one month he only made it into the office six days, with a steady diet of oddball excuses for his whereabouts 15+ times. He should fully check out of tech. CEO made jokes about confusing two Asian employees for each other, at a company wide meeting. He's quite fratty. Leadership is quite passive aggressive and hypocritical. Before COVID, working from home was "allowed", but taking advantage of it more than once in a long while got you targeted and harassed.

CompStak Response

Hi - I want to thank you for taking the time to leave this review. I noticed from your profile, that you said you worked for CompStak for over 5 years. This means that you were a key builder of the company, and for that, I appreciate you. It’s not often today that someone stays at a startup for over 5 years, and I hope that means that on the whole, you had a positive experience. I’m sorry that you felt that you were underpaid for your role at CompStak. While I do believe that today we pay salaries near the top of the market, it’s certainly true that for several years we may not have. Most startup employees choose the promise of future value in their stock options over the current value of their salary. Given our recent Series C announcement (coincidentally on the same day as your post), I hope that (at least on paper), your outcome was excellent. While I won't get into the claims in your post, I will say that our tech stack today, includes many of the technologies that you mentioned we don't use. CompStak's mission is to bring transparency to the world of Commercial Real Estate. That focus on transparency has, and always will translate into our internal culture. With that in mind, I'm disappointed that you didn't come to speak to me directly about your concerns, and I take full accountability for the fact that you must have not felt comfortable doing so. That said, I would like to extend an invitation to you to chat (or for anyone else who reads this post and wants to talk about CompStak culture with me). My email is Michael@compstak.com, and my cell phone number is 917.902.8328. I know that Vadim would also be happy to speak with you. You can reach him at vadim@compstak.com, or 917.533.0393. With Gratitude, Michael Mandel (Co-Founder & CEO)

Company is OK, Leadership is tragic - Software Engineer CompStak Employee Review

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