Pros
Decent offices in San Mateo and San Francisco Sequoia has done a good job of hiring a lot of nice, hard working people Snacks Trying to be more progressive in an industry lacking innovation
Cons
The company is a complete dictatorship. Please do your homework on the CEO's reputation in the industry before you consider taking a job here. Ask yourself if you'll be happy working in an environment with someone who literally has to control every decision in the company (from the napkin color at events to the emails that can be sent to prospects). Do you believe that's an effective leadership structure for a 250 person company? Middle management exists only to carry out his orders and nothing else. Look at the past list of C level execs who have joined Sequoia only to leave within 24 months because of this environment. You will not be immune to it just because you aren't in the management ranks. There is no room for dissent at Sequoia - it is absolutely true that you can't have an opinion that differs from the CEO. If you do it's likely your time will be limited. All employee departures are swept under the rug. Smart, hard working colleagues are often just gone with no explanation of what happened. Never a thank you for their contributions or well wishes for the future. Lately there have been more voluntary departures of really good people who have just had their fill of the dictatorial style of the CEO. This spiteful treatment of departures is part of the overall culture unfortunately. Useless busywork. Outside of all the work you already have on your plate, you'll be forced into cross functional collaboration projects where you have to devise a way to make the business better and devote time to your project and team each week. At the end of 3 months you'll have to present your deliverable and try to roll it out to an employee base that will never wind up using what you worked on. Here's my solution to this - hire an operations team to improve the operations of the company instead of making your client facing roles take on more work. Sequoia has no HR team but has about 8 recruiters and recruiting coordinators. I still don't know what the recruiting coordinators do all day. This is a huge potential liability for when actual HR related matters come up. As others have mentioned, the culture and values are largely fake. Sequoia is a pure volume play on the employee benefits sector, yet one of their stated values is quality over scope. The support teams are overworked and burnt out even though growth goals aren't being hit. I know for a fact that morale is very low across most of the servicing org and people are looking for the exit, but the last 4-5 reviews on here are all people saying how they "LOVE Sequoia". I honestly believe that any negative reviews here are immediately countered by the army of recruiting coordinators trying to maintain the phony facade that people are happy here. And again, everyone lives in fear of saying anything negative internally because there are numerous agents of the CEO just waiting to report back to him. An employee survey was sent out recently but it wasn't anonymized - what kind of company does that?? You will be expected to always be "on" while working here. That's the tone that's set from the top. Think about your future and if work/life balance and family are important to you - Sequoia is trying to grow as fast as a venture backed tech company but attracting talent to the insurance industry is still a major struggle in the Bay Area. You will inevitably pick up the slack as the rate of hiring never comes close to the rate of growth.
