Stash

This was honestly a fantastic place to work when I was here. It was rated one of the best places to work in NYC during my time here. They hired the right people who were great at building culture, building teams, and building products. It is genuinely a fantastic place for short term career progression and you do have the opportunity to learn great skills here.

At some point the company grew way too quickly and the only way they knew how to motivate people was to promote people. A ton of people got promoted before they were ready and that caused a lot of other people to feel animosity for people who got overlevelled (and overcomped) relative to their impact and competency. This caused a vicious cycle of mismatching company and employee expectations. Since I've left, the company has floundered at their attempts to grow beyond the one area where they found product and market fit, and it was in large part due to the previous CEO not understanding the things that actually made Stash successful in the early years.

The company culture never made the successful transition from hot shot startup to mature midlevel company, but their venture rounds and debt burden sure did. After failing to capitalize on consumer anxieties around inflation, the downfall of crypto, a flood of customers with pandemic surpluses and stimuluses; after trying and failing to get acquired or expand to the UK market; after four rounds of layoffs; after extremely high levels of leadership churn without any attempts to stabilize company culture; we have finally gotten to the point where the glassdoor reviews are so low that they've gotten members of the C-Suite who have been at the company for less than a year trying to drive the average company review numbers up by posting a 5 star review that said "Can't think of anything that is a major con."

Hey management, I know you read these. Don't manipulate your glassdoor scores. Your employees are pissed for very good reasons. Thanks.