AlgaeCal reviews

3.5

61% would recommend to a friend

(99 total reviews)

Dean Neuls

60% approve of CEO

60% positive business outlook

AlgaeCal has an employee rating of 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 99 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The AlgaeCal employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Personal Consumer Services industry (3.6 stars).

Reviews by job title

99 reviews
1.0
May 31, 2026

The Culture Is the Problem

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

You won’t need Netflix or Prime Video because eventually your entire life becomes a workplace drama series. If you enjoy office politics, fake positivity, gossip, emotional manipulation, and watching adults act like a high school bully with company laptops, this place will keep you entertained. You’ll become very good at pretending you're fine.

Cons

I stayed at this company way longer than I should have because over time they slowly make you believe that the problem is you. At first you think: “Maybe I just need to work harder.” Then: “Maybe I’m not good enough.” Then eventually: “Maybe I should just feel lucky I still have a job.” That’s honestly the most damaging thing about this place. They slowly destroy your confidence while pretending they’re “developing” you. The company talks nonstop about values, culture, caring, excellence, and being “the real deal,” but almost all of it feels performative once you actually work there long enough. “We care” basically means: We care about protecting leadership and the inner circle. “We believe in excellence” means: Constant micromanagement, overanalysis, politics, endless meetings, and squeezing as much work as possible out of people while paying below market. “Ideal team player” means: Agree with management. Smile constantly. Never challenge anything. Laugh at the right jokes. Pretend every new idea is brilliant even when everyone knows it makes no sense. “Real deal” means: Keep performing happiness and gratitude or eventually become “not a culture fit.” The company honestly feels less like a professional organization and more like a group of high school friends who somehow ended up running a business together and now treat disagreement as betrayal. A lot of leadership decisions make way more sense once you realize certain people are protected no matter what because of personal relationships and history. Accountability somehow disappears the higher up you go. Mistakes by leadership become “learning opportunities,” but mistakes by regular employees become character flaws. The favoritism is extremely obvious. Some people can do no wrong while others feel like they are constantly one small mistake away from being publicly embarrassed, isolated, or pushed out. The micromanagement is exhausting. Tiny irrelevant details become massive discussions while actual structural issues never get solved. You spend more time managing personalities, optics, and politics than doing meaningful work. The culture itself is honestly one of the strangest parts. Everything feels weirdly forced. People act overly enthusiastic all the time because deep down everyone knows they are being evaluated constantly. It creates this fake hyper-positive environment where nobody feels comfortable being honest. There’s also this constant underlying fear. People are regularly reminded how replaceable they are, how AI will take jobs, how lucky they should feel to even be there. After enough time around that messaging, you genuinely start losing confidence in yourself. And the craziest part is that many of the employees are actually talented, hardworking, decent people. But the environment slowly drains them. By the end I barely recognized myself. I was anxious all the time, constantly second-guessing myself, and mentally exhausted outside work too. I work at a proper company now and the difference honestly shocked me. People collaborate normally. Managers trust employees. Disagreement is not treated like disloyalty. You can do your work without constantly feeling psychologically evaluated. Looking back, this place genuinely felt unhealthy.

2.0
May 20, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Fully remote work environment * Company provides necessary office equipment, including Apple computers and other work essentials * High-quality branded company merchandise such as water bottles, backpacks, and more * Employee discounts on products * Friendly and pleasant customers to work with

Cons

Intense and lengthy hiring process * Steep learning curve with limited onboarding support * Culture can feel overly performative and excessively “friendly,” including heavy emoji use in professional conversations * Transparency is promoted publicly, but honest feedback does not always feel welcomed by leadership * Employees are subtly discouraged from taking two full weeks of vacation at once, with pressure to utilize the weekends to minimize impact on the team * Sick leave culture can feel unhealthy at times, with employees encouraged to still work partial days even when unwell to avoid affecting team operations * Leadership structure feels unclear, with multiple people needing to be informed for basic requests * Health benefits are presented as a major perk, but in practice they felt fairly average * Team check-ins and group chats can sometimes feel overly curated, giving new hires the impression of a highly supportive environment while many employees are privately overwhelmed * Training felt rushed — new concepts introduced in the morning were expected to be applied directly in live customer support by the afternoon

1.0
May 14, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

find all the one star reviews for the truth!

Cons

first of all, all the good things are fabricated. i highly recommend coffee chatting with anyone from the company to understand why the employees are unhappy. Working here feels less like being at a professional organization and more like being a background character in a CEO’s personal fever dream. For a company that claims to be "science-based," there is a startling lack of data used in actual decision-making. Strategic pivots are made on whims, and when those decisions inevitably fail, leadership never takes accountability. There are no apologies and no course corrections—just a revolving door of unhappy employees who eventually realize things will never change. The President and the CSO are childhood friends, which explains the impenetrable wall of nepotism. This isn’t a meritocracy. Power is consolidated among people based on how long they’ve known the CEO, leading to a culture where people with no relevant skills are paid more than the technical staff who actually hold the infrastructure together. The President seems to have no interest in high-level organizational health. Instead, he spends his time obsessively micromanaging the marketing teams and reviewing the most minute details of every single person’s work. It is impossible to get anything done when the top executive functions as a bottleneck for basic tasks rather than a leader of a company. It’s hard to take "professional" directives seriously when the CEO is literally cutting a steak in the middle of a meeting or bragging about Lamborghinis with company logos on them. The organization chart is a joke, including personal housekeepers and farmers alongside professional staff. They will move you into different roles without the necessary support or resources, promising "experience" instead of fair compensation or a raise. Leads offer zero guidance and give no path to actual growth if you do not join their hangouts. Leads will straight up tell you your role is not important for the company AND you are replaceable AND you will have no job in X years - like why would anyone respect you if you talk to employees that way??? it's a pretty crazy place and even with all the negative reviews, instead of trying to fix the problems, they just contact people to remove them instead of making actual changes. it just shows how the reviews are true and the inability of the company to reflect on its poor choices

Viewing 1 - 3 of 99 Reviews

Glassdoor has 101 AlgaeCal reviews submitted anonymously by AlgaeCal employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if AlgaeCal is right for you.