Pros
Work on some interesting problems. Great learning experience on how quickly $300M of VC funding can be wasted.
Cons
Veho’s prospects are grim. Even if it survives, industry margins are so thin that it will never be a high value company. There is no vision. Just reactive floundering with an immense focus on doing the wrong things.The company has made some small improvements but is still operating below any objective level of excellence. What management thinks is “great” is actually mediocre - and that's Veho’s core
problem - there is an unchecked epidemic of low operational standards.
Sadly, management is uninspired, inexperienced, complacent, and lacking technical competence and functional expertise. They don't respect how difficult this business is, don't ask the right questions, and make lazy decisions rooted in hubris. The CEO is too easily misled and removed from the operation to see through their excuses for missing goals.
In private, managers proudly describe these excuses as “managing up” - as if creatively
placating the CEO with excuses is what they were hired to do. The CEO has himself to blame for rewarding this glibness instead of hiring for expertise and courage.
Success in this business requires a level of operational discipline and foresight that
management frankly doesn't have. Because they lack this expertise, they have greenlit poor
quality processes that are now permanently baked into the operation. These oversights have left Veho hemorrhaging margin and scaling chaos. Management has resorted to sandbagging and moving goal posts to mask these losses. Veho is now left scrounging for low margin business - trying to drive delivery efficiency by growing discount package volume. Driving down unit revenue this way is a risky strategy and I fear management has miscalculated yet again. Veho has become a discount carrier without the cost structure to sustain this model. We are just subsidizing shippers and calling it “growth”while we barely scrape by.
It’s not that management maliciously accepts this clumsy operation, it’s that they truly don't
understand the business and what it takes to operate at a high level. There are too many
accidental managers who lack both functional expertise and experience running profitable
companies. They are struggling in a profit driven setting.
This mismanagement first occurred after the Series A round, when managers went on a vanity hiring spree. They saw funding as an empire building exercise where they could recklessly increase headcount to elevate their standing and springboard to their next role. This
misadventure led to squandered cash and massive layoffs.
It was disturbing to see management celebrate these layoffs having no impact on company
outcomes. There was no reconciling how additional hires had been so badly mismanaged that management couldn't produce incremental results with them.
Surviving managers were given consolidated control of critical business functions they had no prior experience managing, naturally resulting in poor decisions and oversights. The idea at Veho that management doesn’t need expertise to be effective is a harmful fallacy that has strangled its future.
Management is too focused on creating the illusion of productivity. I see managers falsely
inflating the scope of a problem, forcing themselves into projects, and knowingly burning cash on useless tasks simply because “we need to be seen as helping.” They are more interested in campaigning than in high integrity work because the CEO has enabled this self-promotion grift.
This is a low performance culture that rewards making initiatives merely look impressive.
Executives are thrilled by seeing lots of moving parts even if there isn’t impact. Hence much HQ
management work is purely performative. The few high impact initiatives I have seen were
abandoned because management botched the execution.
Another miss was when HR had a chance to build a new performance review system. Instead of building something innovative, they dawdled for a year cloning mundane practices from other companies and built a substandard program. The new system created perverse incentives and contributed to high attrition. HR management has yet to be held accountable for helping driving out so much talent.
Worse yet is that equity is in the form of ISOs that staff must buy, thus transferring some wages back to Veho for management to burn.
Why does all this matter? A reason to join startups is equity upside. This upside doesn’t exist at Veho. If Veho needs more funding, your equity will be diluted to oblivion. If Veho fails, your equity will be worth 0.
You can create change at Veho, but given the politics, this isn’t ideal. Exposing a gaping hole in the operation may cause management to look inept and retaliate. Or else, they’ll micromanage you to mask their mistake and take credit for your work. You lose either way.
Veho is ok if you're desperate. But seek other jobs while you’re here.
Do your due diligence:
1) Evaluate layoff history
2) Sign NDA/ask for the company’s financials. Check the cash balance and burn rate to
assess remaining runway. See if there is a trend to meaningful profitability
3) Can margins justify Veho’s equity valuations? This is a logistics company, not a tech company. Valuations should reflect low industry margins plus high competition and risk. Companies in this space are failing. Revenue growth is just a vanity metric.
