Apollo Graph Reviews

Pros

-Sales leadership is the best you will find anywhere -Product is world-class and you will work with incredible companies -Licensing strategy and ability to retain customers YoY makes for large upside in year 2 -Ability to course correct. We neglected the commercial offering and suffered churn and layoffs as a result. Leadership has been working tirelessly to understand what customers want to see in our Enterprise offering and have refocused our entire org, roadmap, and strategy to improve GTM motion. The impact has been immediate and churn is starting to stabilize.

Cons

-The open source to enterprise motion is a difficult one. Frontline managers have carried a bag at Apollo and will get you through it, but don't expect to blow out your W2 until Year 2 or beyond

Pros

The company has a bold vision, which, if executed, has the potential to meaningfully transform and industry and make everyone very successful along the way. Early growth is promising and the road map and vision feel aligned to continue the current success. The remote work culture is great. I feel connected to my team, yet enabled to do my work in the way I am most effective; lots of flexibility.

Cons

Typical startup growing pains. Some gaps in key leadership roles. Turnover in existing leadership (most healthy). Beyond that, The macro environment is hard, that's led to some tough pivots. Some previous hypotheses on who our buyers are and what they care about were either wrong or have since evolved. The silver lining is I have been impressed with the company's ability to pivot and align on effective new directions.

Pros

Pay is competitive GraphQL has the power to be transformative

Cons

Read the review from March 6th, it says it all. Continue to miss quarterly quotas and the sales culture continues to be toxic which is perpetuated by the CRO through middle management. Do not come here as a front line seller, it’s the worst career decision I’ve made.

Pros

- GraphQL solves a lot of fundamental problems - but you can also use it all for free if you want to make the effort yourself and not pay Apollo ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ - There are many very amazing and talented people that still work here even after the layoffs - The HR team seems to really care and is doing their best to mitigate the lack of executive leadership experience - The pay was competitive but the overall benefits package for a company of this size is pretty poor. - They interview very well, almost too well, as they laid off ~50 people in December due to over staffing.

Cons

- Founder Syndrome + Floundering on product strategy = a bad case of Flounders Syndrome which made it very hard to understand the direction of the company. - The executive leadership team lacks the experience to scale a company to this size. - They also unfortunately lack the humility to realize their limitations. - There is a ton of micro management and mitigations in place as Apollo's executive leadership lacks trust in their employees. - It's hard to believe the executive leadership team thought it was a good idea to scale the company 2.5x in 2023 then brag about, then layoff 50 people, claiming the macro economy as the problem. It just show the lack of experience in scaling a startup.

Pros

Talented engineers, great people to work with. Generally decent place to work if you choose open source tooling (rust/typescript).

Cons

Horrible engineering planning. Tackles way too many things at once and puts their best engineers on projects with incredibly tight deadlines with no thought given to longer term engineering resources. The product is incomprehensible to outsiders and impossible to onboard onto, the value the company provides is given away for free via open source and what they charge for is legitimately garbage. Re-orgs happen so fast without any thought given to the actual domains of work that need to get done that individual engineers are often left to their own devices and teams lack cohesion. This of course leads to sloppy work, a bad product, and leaves what would be stellar employees in a state of perpetual burnout. Also, they talk a big game on diversity and inclusion, but the layoffs (they promised wouldn’t happen but did the day before holiday break) disproportionately affected underrepresented groups. (9/17 employees let go in product and engineering were women, and we did not have a 50/50 gender distribution prior to the layoffs). No 401k matching, pays under market rate.

Pros

Transparency, modern technology, ability to make an impact, global team, strong leadership. Strong revenue model. Smart founders that know how to focus on what matters. Apollo is a rare company that has the potential to be huge and create a new category - these types of opportunities don't come around often.

Cons

The usual ups and downs that come with being at a startup. Sometimes too much empathy.

Pros

GraphQL is a great technology approach.

Cons

Company Performance: Previous 3 quarters have been a disaster. Not close to ACV targets. Attrition through roof. Marquee customers leaving platform. Hiring posts online are completely fake to make it look like company is doing well. Culture/Environment: Worse than Lacework reputation -- micromanagement stemming from insecurity. Complete focus on wrong things (i.e. making all important features free, which make the Enterprise platform impossible to sell). Everything is fear-based -- everyone, from reps to managers, is afraid to speak out because everyone is afraid for his/her job. Apollo talks about firing reps as casually as the weather -- crazy to think that they are so nonchalant about peoples' livelihoods. Firing reps (as if that is going to help) and not looking at systemic issues at company (i.e. CRO, CEO/CTO, immature leaders, NO enablement/coaching; lack of product; lack of vision). Leadership: Can't make good decisions and can do no wrong -- blame everyone and push problems down to IC-level rather than fix systemic challenges. Retaliation against those who have spoken out. No accountability or quality control. Product: Enterprise platform just not there -- all good features were made free, leaving reps with nothing to actually sell (only things in reps' bag to sell are Contracts and SSO/Auth). Customers are leaving platform so easily, because they can "take their data" out of our managed service yet their Graph still runs. Metrics for Sales/Sales Motion: Need 3 net-new meetings (NNM) a week. Those who hit it are faking it 75% of the time. No quality control on this -- some reps count cold call connects as NNM. ADRs get no coaching and do not help book actual pipeline. More than 80% of deals closed last year came from inbound leads, but there's a broken inbound model. Inbound leads do not get routed to sales reps -- they get routed to ADR manager, who either doesn't work them or puts them in a generic Outreach sequence. Accounts are not assigned -- most inbound or interest coming from Mid-Market-type accounts, but these are not touched. AEs only get 30 Strategic accounts that we hammer into the ground -- completely incorrect ICP -- and we get nowhere then get blamed for lack of pipeline. All falls on AE, not account team as a whole. Nothing wrong with having a plan and accountability, but there is no trust or ability to own your business.

Pros

Great oss adoption Market feedback is listened to by PDE Pushing envelope on new capabilities to go beyond the initial GQL scope Fantastic place to learn, grow, and be challenged Blessed to work with some of the best sales engineers in the world

Cons

Startup, so need to wear many hats Need to be comfortable with quick iterations Takes a real value based sales process given open source

Pros

Smaller company, get access and visibility into a lot more departments processes than larger companies. Peers are generally awesome.

Cons

Benefits - awful. Try to say that your pay is more so they don’t have to give more benefits, but lower pay than most other companies. Never go to a company that lists a benefit as 401(k) unless you ask to make sure they do employer matching. Leadership - awful. Close to chest information. Poor communication. Lack of strategy in most organizations. Poor decision making - laid off a lot of key individuals due to lack of knowledge in roles/responsibilities. Generally, over promise during interviews and very different once inside the org.

Pros

- Amazing people - Great culture - Strong leadership

Cons

- Typical startup growing pains