Urban Ladder Reviews

1) Self inflicted burden of coolness. While the company was making significant losses, it decided to move to a fancy office and dedicated significant amount of money & time to decorate it. There is a palpable air of coolness in UL maybe because of its positioning as a design led brand(although less than 5% revenue comes from UL original designs. The rest are modifications of legs, knobs etc to existing vendor designs & there are no more than 3 furniture designers in the entire company) 2) A fair number of less than capable people at the top who have grown too big for their boots. With titles like VP and SVP becoming common currency in startups for early employees, the early batch of senior management is far from great. Apart from being incompetent because they handle functions which they were never trained for, their interpersonal & team management skills are often wanting 3) The CEO is rude, caustic and a mini-tyrant. Even the COO faces the brunt of his sarcastic barbs in open forums. The senior management, because of their own lack of capability, function as yes men to the CEO & nod consent to his ever changing whims & fancies. He is a typical case of a consultant who is sharp and intelligent but stops being humble & self critical. Most importantly, he never learnt to be a decent human being. He cant even take a joke about himself without a sharp & often personal retort. A highly immature leader who lacks self assessment & poise. 4) Lack of vision & strategic depth - Absolute unwillingness+inability to see realities of the market led to UL missing important pivots. A late & poorly executed Interior Design Service. Delaying the offline launch. Over simplistic market sizing to draw investments. Everyone makes mistakes but if a bunch of fairly smart people who got the basics right make so many poor moves, there is no coming back