BILL

The job offers good pay and a stable company.

I speak here as an employee who came to BILL from Divvy, and recognize that for many people the stable, process-oriented, top-down leadership culture at BILL might be exactly what they’re looking for. There are plenty of reviews on here that show that! I speak as someone who enjoys the startup world and recognize that.

However, it has been incredibly difficult over this last year as I’ve watched my team at Divvy’s empowering and trusting upper management be replaced with leadership that can’t help but always hop into meetings and make long-winded speeches and underinformed decisions rather than trust us to be making the right decisions on the ground. And for company-wide changes, transparent, casual leadership at the top and open seeking of feedback at Divvy has now been replaced by surprise declarations steeped in corporate and legal speak.

Leadership is the big con at BILL and you can’t ignore it - they make sure they’re in every meeting and Slack channel and changing your day-to-day constantly. And their view of Divvy’s people spreads- you only need to skim through some of the reviews here to see that BILL as a whole doesn’t view Divvy as the talented group of innovators that it is. They’re seen as rebels that won’t fall in line with the new parent company. In public, this is never said. But everyone at Divvy can feel it, and it’s crushing the company.

I’m not sure what the solution is here. The original plan communicated after acquisition was allowing Divvy to continue to operate as a strong and independent entity with its own style and brand. And I think that was wise, given that the companies are fundamentally different.

To be honest, though, it might be that BILL’s current tack of just forcing their way of doing things on Divvy may be a plan that will work in the end. It will, though, end up having to swap out most Divvy employees, who all hired on for a drastically different culture. I personally don’t know any Divvy engineers right now that are fully happy at BILL All are looking for other jobs at least to some degree. If this is the goal, harsh as it is, stay the course and you may end up with a homogenous culture with a different set of people.

But if it’s not, please reconsider. You bought the company in large part for its talent. And you’re about to lose most of it.