7y
Hi, thanks for the detailed feedback! There is not enough room to respond to every critique here, but I will try to address the overall messaging.
#1 - I am not going to apologize for working 100 hours per week and expecting employees at an early stage company (that can go out of business at literally any point) to have a strong desire to build something special. That might mean putting a few extra hours in then would be the case at a 1,000 person company. This is expected, not asked. Why would you want to work somewhere that fails?
Jack Ma famously requires employees to work 9-9, Monday through Saturday. Our average hours are 10-6, with a lunch break, that is not even a 40 hour workweek. Plus tons of days off, weekends, nights off too. If you want to have a cushy high paying job where you can get 6 weeks vacation and not check email on the weekend, going to a startup with 10 people is certainly not for you. I am sorry that you had the wrong expectations coming in. This is certainly like being in bizzaro world, every job I ever had the CEO sits on the beach and works 20 hours per week. Ray Dalio took home hundreds of millions of dollars in pay at Bridgewater when I was there. That is great, he worked hard to make that happen, I am happy for him and shook his hand at the end of the year. At a startup, I am blasted on the internet for working 100 hours and making minimum wage, while expecting my employees to work 20 and making $150k. I set the right example, I have nothing to apologize for.
#2 The company is only a year old. We provide 18-24 month roadmaps to customers, we work to meet those roadmaps. I don't understand this mentality that we are somehow always pivoting or not truthful to customers. They are coming to us for this reason. I have tried to get all members of the team into sales meetings. You are actually making the sales case for me, clients are buying into a vision and a roadmap. It is a cloud based platform that takes many months and years for them to use and deploy. TD Bank has 25 million customers, and has DEPLOYED the platform to customer in Canada. How many 1 year old companies can say that? This idea that I am PT Barnum is laughable, but flattering at the same time.
#3 It's unprofessional to bring up anonymous potential arguments about regulatory, legal, or accounting matters. We spend HUNDREDS of thousands of dollars per year on third-party firms. Running a company, in fintech, or healthtech, or other complex areas, is not simple. We go above and beyond what is needed, sometimes third-parties don't agree with us, that is just a part of doing business, and it's a cost of doing business over 5-10 years (Look at all the challenger banks now and the hit pieces in the press trying to take them down). Please don't make this an indictment of my personal or professional character. This anonymous character assassination that exists on this site and other places on the web, by disgruntled employees and "anonymous sources" is tearing our country apart. Don't let it tear companies apart too.