Usermind Reviews

* Cursing: the CEO easily embarrassed and shamed even the most hardened individuals. * Ineffective communication: when over half the words in most sentences are all from the root f-word, the percentage of meaningful words drops * Awful hiring decisions with no input. The CEO, after firing her co-founder and CTO, brings in an unqualified person as CTO with no input from her technical experts who have combined decades of experience in Amazon alone. * CEO attempts to direct detailed design concepts in distributed systems despite disinterest to learn the basics. * Arbitrary deadlines. New, incompetent CTO makes promises to CEO without input from the engineering team, based on “designs” that he will not divulge to anyone. * Engineers, who had been working in a highly collaborative, mutually supportive environment, are suddenly faced with having to do a full re-implementation they had no input on. * Captive external company JSL received plum assignments from mutual employee, a clear conflict of interest to which the CEO turned a blind eye. * Customer Success leader is summarily fired despite long term friendship with CEO. CS team departs. * Engineers leave or are fired. Backfills are far less capable, though cheaper, thus CEO sees only upside. * CRO and CEO battle often. Eventually, with almost no sales and certainly no path to cash flow positive much less profit, the CRO quits/is fired * Sales team totally turns over, no surprise, no sales, no commissions, no retained people. * CEO eventually realizes just how incompetent the replacement CTO is, fires him. * Most senior engineer remaining is begged to stay so someone knows how things are built * Net result: Only the CEO is left in 2020 of anyone who was there before late 2017 / early 2018. That’s five years of the company’s timeline with no context remaining. * Two questions remain: 1) if you were an investor would you bet your funds on Usermind? And 2) if you’re an engineer with a range of possible places to work, would you choose this meat grinder of a company? * Other than the above, it’s a fine place to work.

Ruthless culture. At an all-hands meeting, when Usermind introduced a new senior leader, reporting directly to the CEO, , the CEO told the following story of why the other leading candidate was not hired. Although highly inappropriate in my opinion, to reveal such details of hiring decisions, especially in front of the winning candidate, let alone the entire company, the CEO pressed on. Both candidates were interviewed by the Board Chair, a prominent venture capitalist. It turned out that the losing candidate was raised on his family’s cattle ranch. The Chair was somehow inspired to ask that candidate, “at your ranch, did you kill the cows yourself, or did you outsource that to a meat packing plant?” When the candidate responded that this ugly task was outsourced, apparently that clinched the decision in favor of the other candidate. Ironically the winning candidate comes from a culture where many revere cows. After the senior leader, the “cow” killing began in earnest. Specifically, the entire engineering staff either resigned or was fired within the year. The leader literally had to beg the last remaining experienced engineers to stay on so that systems could be kept operational. Even so, they all leftleft a few months later. Replacements were hired, but most have also left. Often the reason was the engineering director would arbitrarily overrule technical decisions without consulting the most experienced engineers on the team. The cow killing extended beyond engineering. Specifically, the CRO, Chief of Human Resources, and Chief of Customer Sicess also left around the same time. Not surprisingly, the cow killing seems only to extend downwards. When the CEO ordered yet another three month death march, threatening in a meeting to fire all the engineers with dismissal if the deadline was missed, the new leader admitted privately that the deadline was impossible, but said that he’d lose his job if he pushed back. In the end, the leader acquiesced to the impossible deadline.