Pros
Great product suite. Fun coworkers. Seemingly infinite budget for happy hours.
Cons
I will caveat this by saying I was part of the layoffs in November of 2022. I wasn't going to post this, but ran into some old colleagues out and about and after hearing their stories of the company now, figured I'd share some notes from my time there. Ownbackup - or I guess "Own" now - has no North Star leadership. The CEO continuously makes *baffling* decisions that leave the talented employees and other Salesforce agencies scratch their head. A few: -Acquired RevCult and inherited their product, which was completely outside our core competencies. Ignored engineers and sales members who pushed for an acquisition in the DevOps space instead, kneecapping us compared to full suite end-to-end Deployment + Backup competitors. -Set astronomically laughable sales goals based on above product, providing little to no enablement on it, and then punished employees based on CEO's inability for forecast. -Watched as our CFO left the company without any warning, and then just didn't provide us a reason for it. Failed to replace the CFO for months and instead promoted a friend and "yes" man to the position. -Spent close to 10M dollars on an all hands Mid Year Kick Off to Vegas, which was more a trip to boost the CEO's ego. Activities included a pool party where the CEO watched us from the VIP suite no one was allowed into, watching the CEO lead a light up neon marching band around a conference room at 8 AM, and watching the CEO interview an astronaut - I think. He might have been a former Olympian. Regardless. Employees were not allowed to expense any meal or drink while there. We were given a 50 dollar gift certificate, which in Vegas, is good for about 2 meals. -Spent at least millions at Dreamforce two months later, including hiring a B-list band to play at a party no one attended. -Forced employees that had been hired remotely to come into the office 3 days a week. The CEO had massively expanded the office in NJ and London and built a new office in Tel Aviv. To justify the return to office, the CEO said "you're actually saving money since you don't have to buy coffee." This return to office meant that employees who worked out of the NJ HQ had to take the shuttle in from Manhattan, which added 2 hours of commute time. I do no think free coffee is worth two hours of anyone's work. SDRs and XDRs, the youngest employees and least able to advocate for themselves, had to come in five days a week. -Laid off 20-30% of the staff IMMEDIATELY AFTER spending millions in Vegas and at Dreamforce and the office expansions. Layoffs felt personal. Managers used them as an opportunity to axe employees they didn't vibe with, despite their stats or tenure. Laid off employees had 2 weeks of insurance, minimum industry severance, and weren't allowed to keep or purchase their laptops. They were notified via 5 minute zoom calls and were immediately then blocked from every single system - their laptops just turned off. -In the months following the layoffs, OwnBackup still flew 300 employees to Atlantic City for a Sales Kickoff and somehow found the money to have their President's Club trip to Aruba. It was a massive slap in the face to every employee who lost their job. -I obviously don't have the inside scoop for the rebranding, but I can say most Salesforce people I've chatted with think changing your name from OwnBackup to Own is just terrible for SEO. Posting this is sad. I used to love working at OwnBackup. But in my time there, I heard employees scream the homophobic f-slur with impunity on company outings, watched as managers took credit for their employees hard work, seen employees forced out of the company for having differentiating opinions, and had to sit by while some employees were given carte blanche to be themselves while others were actively punished for it. DEI initiatives were a joke - LGBTQ employees were told they couldn't form a BRG. Several women felt uncomfortable on the sales team and left. And the sales team with very white. I'd have conversations with coworkers where we'd find massive discrepancies in our pay rates despite working the same exact jobs. A female colleague who was more tenured than I was (and arguably much smarter than myself) was making ~60k less than me. I've chatted with employees who have since left the company who have told me about abusive managers and toxic work culture. I want what's best for OwnBackup - truly. They have some absolutely incredible and talented employees. But they are not on the path to accomplish that.
