C3.ai

A modern office with views of the Bay in Redwood City.

Free lunch served daily; good coffee and snacks.

A modern gym in the Pacific Shores Center.

Business model. The company is valued like an AI/tech company but operates as an analytics/consulting company. Read the financial statements.

Tech. The tech is, in my opinion, archaic. This means little to no exposure to marketable skills for engineers. This is maybe the greatest risk of them all: while you can ride the stock up and down (and more so down), you'll soon realize that none of this will last very long - and come interviewing time (either by voluntary resignation or involuntarily through the constant firings), you'll have learned nothing that's of any value in the tech industry and will have likely fallen far behind your peers. There's also a "title inflation" at C3 that doesn't transfer. (I have never seen as many "Directors," "Senior Directors," etc., anywhere else.)

Rinse and repeat. While it can be fun at times to learn about some distant industry you would've otherwise never touched, as an employee (= consultant) at C3 you repeat the same motions every few months (the McKinsey-inspired "playbook"). This means you'll likely stagnate in your personal and technical growth. (But you'll become great at "consulting.") The work can be best-described as mundane but high-stress.

Culture and toxicity. "The fish smells from the head" - while it's unlikely you'll ever engage with TS, it's clear he's not heard the word "no" for a long time. He has surrounded himself with yes-men who do whatever it takes to please him. This has created a culture of toxicity unlike any I've ever seen. Stress and burnout are rampant at C3. Yelling, threats to fire people, firings, etc., are "just another Tuesday."

The saddest part of it all is that C3 couldn't have found itself in better circumstances:

• Founded right at the end of the recession in 2009, going into a 15+ years bull market,
• Founded by a billionaire with a sheer endless Rolodex of business contacts,
• Hired hundreds if not thousands of high-calibre staff from Stanford, MIT, Google, McKinsey, ...,
• A huge beneficiary of the 2022+ AI craze (owning the $AI stock ticker),
• Hundreds of millions of $ of cash in the bank with no debt.

Despite these circumstances, we're looking at 15+ years of perceived business failure - failure to build "sticky" products that businesses and people actually want to use, failure to build any great tech or have a strategy (instead, unsuccessfully chasing one "hot" trend after another: IoT, AI, Gen AI, ...), and failure to build a great team/culture (instead, a revolving door of talent).

It feels like everyone who engages with C3 loses - its customers, certainly its investors, and most of its employees. The ones who "win" are the old-timers, who've been there since the early days and who've been paying themselves handsome salaries comparable to oil and gas C-suite compensations - while the company loses hundreds of millions of $ every year.

Read the Kerrisdale report. I'd strongly advise against joining C3. The company has a poor reputation in the Bay Area, so not only will you suffer while you're there, you'll also experience a career stagnation/setback and suffer afterwards. You may make some money in the short term, but in the medium to long term, you'll do more damage than good to your career. As someone else wrote here, "don't do this to yourself."

I don't have much hope for management, and I know they wouldn't listen to this or ever read this.