Karat

• Friendly, talented, nice people at the level I worked at (hands-on work with the product and customers). The people who actually interact with the product are the best I've ever worked with, which made it even harder to part ways so suddenly when layoffs happened.

• Focused on diversity and they appear to have actually tried to incorporate diverse voices at all levels of the company, not just the entry level.

• In the first couple of years, lots of nice team events: lunches, dinners, Scribble.io, swag. They even sent us plants with a full kit to start planting them.

• Solid benefits: good pay, stock options, healthcare, and a lump sum monthly stipend that you can apply to anything on your credit card spending. Extra holidays, including a summer break and winter break that other companies don't have, and unlimited PTO (take that as you will).

• No pressure to work onsite or commute. Fully remote-friendly, and I liked that. I don't think being remote is to blame for culture issues; it's management.

It hurts me to have to write this section, but it needs to be said. This was the best company I've worked for in my short time since graduating, and it's just sad to see the way things have gone for Karat. Poor management. Layoffs. Broken culture after starting out so good. Lack of transparency. I'll go on in more detail below.

• Poor management of budget led to the events that spiraled downhill in 2023. We already had very few team events by the end of 2022 because of poor morale and revenue dropping off a cliff. Two massive layoffs less than five months apart really killed the vibe.

• After the first layoff (January), team events basically stopped altogether. We lost lots of talented teammates and didn't even get to say goodbye. After the layoff, work simply continued but with a tense atmosphere where everyone wanted to prove that they belonged, wanted to build projects, but had nothing to build.

• Had to find work on my own to look busy because so little work was being assigned to my team. Straight up, no clue what management was thinking. You have nine talented engineers who are being paid full-time salaries; make use of their time, please?

• Generally baffling decision-making by higher-ups. Why acquire Triplebyte, a name mired in controversy and negative press, when Karat is already starved of funding and had one round of layoffs already? Doesn't make sense in the least.

• Then not one but two security breaches on our marketing site due to having used a third-party vendor when the company was new. The first time, I get it. But the second time? How did you let that happen? The domain got blacklisted on Google's malware detection list, and we had to work late to reach out to Google Support and get that unlisted so people could start using the marketing site again.

• Absolute breakdown of transparency and trust between the IVE community and full-timers. IVEs generate the value and interact with Karat customers directly; they deserve better. The loss of trust led to rumors spreading rampant, and the response from management was to create a brand-new channel outside of Slack and kick them all out. Now we couldn't communicate with them at all, and it had to all go through a third-party team called CX. Or, they had to just cut a ticket and wait for one of us to see it. Extending the game of telephone is not the best look for improving transparency.

• Too many Karens and basic bros in middle management and higher management. They aren't technical. They don't know the product, and all they do is manage people and sit in meetings all day. You can tell in how they approach talking about our product in the first place. Just utter disconnect from the technical work of the people they manage, while they produce no value aside from wasting time in meetings with stories of what latte they had over the weekend or where they went fishing with their dog. If you want to save revenue, start with them and cut down on meeting length too.

• Fresh, shiny ideas of a UI/UX collective, a diversity panel, or a product design bootcamp are proposed but never materialize. There is just no commitment to following through on good ideas, and they end up wasted. A Slack channel is created, we're added, and then it just sits there with no activity and no follow-up.

Check the cons section where it's all laid out. The co-founders need to do some serious reading and self-reflection if they want their company to go anywhere. Build your company around the talent it has and the vision you originally had. Stop deviating from it by making shortsighted and impulsive decisions like acquiring something that gives no value.

Startup growing pains are fine; that's expected. But you can't keep sweeping things under the rug and acting like a startup when you recruit that aggressively. You have Serena Williams as an advocate – how do you mess up this bad?