Its a cool opportunity, but is it worth it? - Sales Flexport Employee Review

2.0
May 12, 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Very exciting industry and you can learn a lot about a new industry.

Cons

Terrible management. Very cliquey at the top. Ryan is a workaholic and believes everyone at the company should be as well. We're talking 12 to 14 hour days + be on call, responsive when you aren't there. If you don't have slack on your phone you're 90% of the way to being let go. Sanne comes from years of consulting and is decent at moving chess pieces but doesn't actually get much done. Surprising that Ryan sees as much as he does. Ben is delusional. Great sales person but should never be in charge of overseeing people. He has no idea how to handle adversity and just tries to buy his way out of problems. All in all, they aren't bad people, they just believe they know everything. When it comes to doing "the right thing" they could care less about their employees. I would steer clear of this place if you're looking for any kind of work, life balance or ability to make an impact.

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Flexport Response
9y
Ryan Petersen here, CEO of Flexport. Something struck me as off about this review as soon as I saw myself described as a "workaholic." Nobody has ever called me that, and anyone who knows me or worked with me will find it funny. Also we have not lost a salesperson in 11 months so I suspect this person is not who they claim to be. That said, it is true that our team works really hard. We grew revenues 60% again this month (May 2017 vs April 2017) and have maintained ~20% compound monthly growth for over 3 years. Hard work is the price of working at one of the fastest growing companies in Silicon Valley. It's simply not true, however, that we don't care about our people. We've designed our entire organization around cross-functional autonomous teams that are empowered to make decisions without requiring instruction or permission from above. Our goal is for these teams to behave like immune cells, where they see a problem and attack it, rather than forming a committee to get approval from a "clique" at the top of the company. We also have a large and growing team dedicated to enablement, training, and process improvement, who conduct workshops to identify problems and help the teams find solutions through new product features or processes. We do performance reviews quarterly using the "nine blocks" methodology, providing objective findings to every employee so they know where they sit and what they need to get ahead. And our global rotational program each quarter gives 5-10 of our stars at all levels of the org the opportunity to transfer to a new function or geography. We believe in developing well rounded, cross functional people who understand all aspects of our business. Our model works—we maintained an NPS in the mid-60s for over a year since we started measuring it. Our Culture Amp scores from our confidential internal surveys routinely show that we are in the top few percentile for employee engagement. And we wouldn't be ranked the 4th best place to work in the SF Bay Area this year if Flexport was as this poster describes. In the end, the thing I'm most proud about in building Flexport is our investments in our people, culture, and organizational design. We have built an organization that empowers people to get work done without the BS bureaucracy that cripples so many companies. And it's precisely that culture of autonomy that allows me to not have to be a workaholic. I'm sorry that it didn't work out for the original poster. High-paced startups aren't for everybody. I wish him or her well in future endeavors though. PS I always use neatly formed paragraphs when I write too, this site just sucks at formatting.

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Cons

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5.0
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Pros

Lots of really smart and nice people at the company. The culture has improved a lot recently. There's a good amount of room to develop and jump on things that you might not be exposed to in other companies.

Cons

The company moves a little too fast at times and maybe overlooks things that are working well and don't necessarily need to be changed for "efficiency" at the risk of doing things incorrectly. It can be hard to move up in some departments. work/life balance varies a lot by team.

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