Absolutely Awful - Anonymous employee Choose Energy Employee Review

I was recruited by the investors to help build Choose Energy in its earliest days. Not unlike those who came after me, I wasn't even aware that a consumer energy market existed before joining the venture. In the Valley, most of us either are or have been part of an early stage venture. Adtech, clothing, music, SaaS, PaaS, social media, etc are all interesting but you won't run into anyone at a mixer trying to build a marketplace and platform software for the deregulated energy business. So, it's different, and as my former co founder and colleague would say, it's HUGE! The energy market in just the 24 or so deregulated states represents about $500B in revenue annually. That's an awfully big market ripe for disruption. To sum up, the pros of working at Choose are: the market opportunity, the team ( I hired most of the original, core team), the investors, and the vertical (you'll learn all kinds of new terms and business models to be sure). I left Choose after helping to recruit the current CEO. I'm an early stage guy. I know where my strengths and passion live. After a crazy 2 years of high speed development and growth, it was time to let someone else with more experience take over the reigns during the next critical growth stage. I still love the company, the space, and my former colleagues. Given the chance, I'd do it again.

I honestly don't think that Choose suffers from the pressure of startup anymore than others do. Early stage venture is tough. Companies under pressure from investors and, quite frankly, ourselves, can run too hot, get ahead of ourselves, cut corners, or lose focus. Any of those debts incurred only compound down the road to create a sometimes difficult challenge for the team. I've experienced adversity at every startup I've participated in over the past 20 years. It always sucks, but we keep coming back because it's what we do, on occasion fooling ourselves into thinking that such adversity was confined to our last attempt.

1) The company is trying to tackle a huge problem that has actual societal benefit 2) Business growth lessons - if you love learning how to scale businesses there is nothing better than doing so in a largely undiscovered vertical. And while, ups and downs happen everywhere, difficulty is where the value is, and at different scale levels the team is uncovering (honestly) surprising engagement and growth levers. That absolutely means some re-roadmapping of products, so the flexibility has been a challenge / exciting 3) the people. average blend of "suits" and "eng". nowhere different to other places i have been, but seriously, its a solid group to work with every day. and yeah, we have this thing called garaje friday. i strongly recommend you find out what it means. 4) the secret, our long-term plan. energy in North America is changing and we are going to be the first true cross-North American energy brand. thats a pretty awesome goal. 5) the dallas team, and our founder, Jerry. we have a dallas team that has more industry connections and passion than likely any other in the state of texas.

Product re-roadmapping as the company found its legs through different phases of growth. its meant some rewrites and prod delays. a lot of pressure to continue to move at high speed when sometimes patience and trust in execution is needed. It's not going to get the front page of Techcrunch on a Monday - which can be hard in the SF culture where everyone is watching the press Multiple office locations can be difficult