Rearden Commerce Reviews

Pros

dynamic, fun, smart people, considerate, forward thinking, energetic, good culture, synergistic, hopeful, knowledgable, capable, educated, proven, strong programmers, good recruiting, good HR

Cons

disorganized, top heavy, too many goals, unfocused, confused, bad management, poor execution, no roadmaps, poor vision, fluffed titles, too many directors

Advice to Senior Management

Please control titles and advancement to management. The proportion of directors/VPs in this company compared to "ordinary" individuals is hurtful to the company. Create a roadmap that is universal and a well understood product plan that has a clear vision of the future for Rearden Commerce.

Pros

The customers were the most rewarding experience!

Cons

Very unprofessional and uncooperative environment.

Pros

Growing fast in terms of headcount, strategic partners, vision and roadmap footprint

Cons

Execution needs lots of improvement. Lots of big, abstract thinkers and fast talkers in the product and biz teams without any leadership in operational or "executional" excellence to guide development teams.

Advice to Senior Management

Execution, operation, details. That's what makes a small company with aspirational intent a big one. Otherwise, it'll just be a cool, little company.

Pros

Good vision, but needs more work especially to execute that vision. People are hard working, considerate, and parties are fun.

Cons

Senior management is terrible, they dont care at all about us lower level employees. No consideration about how an employee is doing.

Advice to Senior Management

CEO needs to be more visible, cut the trips. Cut the rants. Your low level guys are working hard, your e-staff is horrible, a CTO who's nerdy as hell, and jumping on 5 different technologies, focus on one thing, and be good at the one thing first. Spreading way too thin at the moment. Feels like a sinking ship.

Pros

A very compelling vision and strong investors who seem willing to continue to support the business financially. There are talented people in the ranks who want perform and be led.

Cons

The common denominator over the 11 history of the company's high turnover, non-execution and poor employment brand is the CEO. The BOD is either too weak or unwilling to make the most significant change necessary which is to replace the CEO who in turn would replace much of the leadership team. The technology, products and engineering organizations historically do not deliver, sales has virtually nothing to sell and there is no professional HR or support for employees. The rest of the G&A functions are weak and/or overly protective of their jobs and loyalty to the CEO.

Advice to Senior Management

Replace the CEO with a leader who has built a strong leadership team, created a culture of high performance and who rebuild trust, esprit and execution. Without the strong leadership at the top who will effectively plan, hire and execute while building a high energy high engagement culture, this venture is at risk.

Pros

Free Parking underground. Your car doesn't get too hot after a day of worthlessness.

Cons

Bad middle management, unclear direction and goals, lots of pep rallies, middle managers blaming their underlings

Advice to Senior Management

Middle management needs to be present at work rather than working from home.

Pros

This is a SaaS company with large customer base, you got to learn the staging/deployment/support aspect after product is released, good experience to have from career perspective.
People I have seen so far are all very professional and hard-working.
Technology stack is quite cool and widely used open source standards, which again serves one well from career perspective. They also have sophiscated branching mechanism, automated build process, integrated mandatory code review, google doc/wiki for collaboration etc.
It's a dynamic place with lots of energy, but people are not expected to work 14 hours a day.
Sales seem to have uncanning ability to sell, coming from another company where product is rock solid but sales is weak, I appreciate this more than anything.

Cons

Seems too many priorities and projects going on at the same time. Upper management should look across the board and making hard choices.
Some of the logistics can use some improvement - no org chart, no seating chart, which they said they're working on.

Pros

I have learned more in my first few months at Rearden than I learned in the last few years. There is a great energy in the engineering organization and a lot of extremely smart people. And for the first time in my professional life, there is management support for "doing things right".

I think a lot of this is due to the CTO, a former EBay architect, who is overseeing a big transformation of the old code base into a more modern architecture. Everything is being broken up into independent services (accessed via REST APIs) and redesigned for scale. We're now using Cassandra, Flume, Memcached, Grails, Eucalyptus and a host of other modern technologies. Things I've been wanting to use for years but haven't been able to. There is a very open attitude towards open source products. If you can make a case for it, it will be seriously considered.

I have found the engineering management to be very good as well. Most managers and directors are very technical, and the ones I have interacted with have been open minded and very positive and supportive.

There are weekly "Rearden University" sessions, where new technologies or projects are highlighted. There are monthly "pitstop" days where all scheduled work stops, and engineers are encouraged (strongly!) to work on side projects, such as trying out new technologies, or prototyping new project ideas (the managers are responsible for making waffles on pitstop days). And recently we have been getting business authors like Geoffrey Moore in to speak to the company.

I am still somewhat new here, and maybe there are problems I haven't seen, but so far I have found it to be a great workplace.

Cons

I have been in headquarters for months but have never seen the CEO. It would be nice if he would face the employees occasionally.

When people ask me what Rearden does, I still have trouble giving a clear answer. Is it a travel company? Is it a B2B platform company? Does it make a "Personal Assistant"? What are "Smart Apps"?

Much of the product is still on the old code base, and it will take a lot of work to modernize it, however the company does seem to be serious about making the investment.

Advice to Senior Management

Provide a clearer explanation of the vision. What exactly is Rearden Commerce? If your employees struggle to say what Rearden does, think about how difficult it must be for potential customers.

Pros

Very nice location, good restaurants around, nice parking, some very talented and hard working people.

Cons

Innumerable here. Senior management is full of lies, they say it is web 3.0 but their travel engine is very old, the companies they bought have technology that is very old and the other services they have are a few years old. Profitability is a very distant dream. Everyone is moving in the direction they like. Poor leadership across the board. Senior management is well versed with the latest buzz words and make great videos out of them but no one knows how to make the company successful. It is a revolving door at the top. Senior executives come and go as if it is a museum or a park.

Advice to Senior Management

Any advice is useless and nothing is going to change.

Pros

Rearden has a lot of very smart people and good clients. It has a good potential and signing up important clients and partners.

Cons

Many good people are leaving the company. They have to find a way to retain valuable employees. The direction of the company is changing too often.