Pros
Some really great teammates, especially in the South American offices. Great work/life balance. Some cool travel opportunities.
Cons
Grabr started out with a pretty incredible vision to upend global commerce. It was a thread-the-needle opportunity that would create a multi-billion dollar business if it was executed with extraordinary precision. It wasn't. The Founders are extremely presentable, very skilled at sales and did an impressive job of raising outside capital. The company had an amazing first couple of years! However, they have virtually no real work experience, chose to insulate themselves with a very young and inexperienced team, and quickly sour on anyone who pointed out potential flaws in their approach or business model. The result is like a bad high school clique, where the founders are the popular kids surrounded by a group of boot lickers that bullies anyone in the company who doesn't make it into the inner circle. "Personal loyalty" to the founders was the thing they valued the most. They would sometimes hire smart, experienced people who would try to steer the company in the right direction, but then quickly sour on them - often treating them very poorly and unprofessionally until they quit. With that foundation, Grabr was doomed to eventually fail and it seems to have now reach that point. While the founders will put all of the blame on Covid, their own mismanagement and questionable judgment are really the culplrits. And a lot of people are getting hurt. The business has had little or no growth for several years, and revenue was inflated with cancelled or duplicate transactions. Venture capital dollars and a brilliant idea to have travelers provide working capital have propped up the business. But as dollars have gotten tighter and tighter, integrity and good judgement have gone out the window. The company was already built on a strategy of lying, cheating and bribing its way through customs (see what the Wall Street Journal had to say on the subject), and now that approach has extended to misdirecting payments meant for travelers to keep the business afloat a little longer. Travelers foot the bill for shoppers' purchases, even though Grabr gets paid upfront. As the company has run out of cash, it has stopped paying travelers, but kept encouraging them to make deliveries and strings them along with promises of payments that are never going to happen. Travelers who work with Grabr thinking they will earn a couple hundred bucks are instead losing a few thousand dollars that they have no hope of ever seeing again. Worse, Grabr continues to string them along to this day, despite knowing that they will never be paid. Social media is strewn with many hundreds of complaints about missing payments. It's a very disappointing end, and sad to see the founders drift from naive decision making to outright ripping many people off.