6y
Hey bud,
First of all, I’m really sorry you feel this way. Know that you can always approach me and discuss whatever frustration you may have face to face (You might still work with us, it looks like you changed your “employee status” from “current employee” to “former employee” afterwards).
You must know that I have an open-door policy. We are, obviously, not very close and I doubt you know me very well, so I don’t take the allegation you made personally. Yet, allow me to respond.
1) Company has a distinct vision since 2016: Dathena is a deep-tech company that brings a new paradigm to data privacy and security solutions. Leveraging the power of modern AI technologies, Dathena delivers breakthrough, petabyte-scale solutions with unprecedented accuracy, efficiency and speed that build consumer trust in a digital world and ensure the “privacy and data security protection journey.”
You may have missed it, but we are communicating the same on our website, LinkedIn, and even Glassdoor. You can also find this in any presentations we use internally and externally for our clients and partners.
2) We have been working extremely hard since 2016, acquired our first clients with the founding team in 2017, and re-developed the product 3 times learning from our mistakes (MVP, Version 1.0 and Version 2.0). Building a business from scratch is a lot of hard work (I hope you will have a similar experience one day, your perspective may change, even just a bit).
Oh, and I don’t consider people as a bunch of sheep (and I don’t bark); You may discover that I care about people, trust and empower my colleagues a lot. I like cheerleading, but I can easily take hard decisions when required. I hate micro-managing, I walk away from this anytime I can so I can spend time building teams thriving for excellence that under promise and overdeliver. I have high expectations, and I do challenge people. I like challenging myself and being challenged too 😊.
Regardless of what you do, always remember the purpose of the project you are involved in. At Dathena, we are not here to protect ONLY data; we are here to protect people (and people’s data - see our company vision and mission). I’m very proud of our team and what we have achieved thus far (even if we made mistakes along the way). We still have a lot of great things to do – that’s also why I’m always excited about what we are building. We are far from having achieved our objectives and deliver our vision.
3) The management team (CEO Office, Sales, Marketing, Engineering, AI and Client Solutions) cumulates more than 150 years of experiences. At the same time, the average age in our company is 30 .5 years with less than 10% turnover during the last 24 months. Still a young company for sure, but not quite precisely immature as you would suggest. 14% of our employees are interns, especially in the AI team, where we do a lot of research around new A.I. technics and concepts. We have over 16 different nationalities, 25% of our staffs are women, and 60% of the management team are women…
I think your comments on diversity and color of skin are quite misleading when you look at the figures.
I want to add that we grew from 5 employees in January 2017 to 70 in January in 2020. During the first year, I used my savings to fund the company before finding business angels and VCs to support our growth. All these investments helped us to fuel a 400% growth in 2019. Not bad for a company with “no real” solution, uh? Oh, but you probably did not ask, and maybe are not aware of our progress and achievements we share through our Monthly General Meeting or Quarterly Townhall – or you just haven’t been with us long enough... Also, and only in case you are still with us, please spend time on our online demo available to all our employees here: http://demo.dathena.io. Did you make hasty comments or conclusions? It looks like it.
4) Mistakes have been made, and your comment is self-explanatory - such frustration in a company should never happen. Managing growth is exciting but also challenging. We must spin a lot of plates at the same time and bring maturity equally over People, Process and Technology. Did we show you our internal Maturity Assessment report using the CMMI Framework? It’s a lovely exercise to monitor the “actual” maturity across the organization. The conclusions of our internal report are quite insightful (We have shared it with our investors, who we believe would love to see similar things in their startups' portfolio). Subsequently, we are focusing on reinforcing our Governance, People and Culture and Product team (our product roadmap is quite ambitious!!!).
As for KPIs - last year, we established OKRs (well, using the OGSM model), something I used quite extensively in my past corporate career. So yes, we have KPIs in place, not perfect yet but it’s improving. We even have KRIs in place (Look, you might have learned something new). This is how you take calculated risks and monitor your risk exposure.
5) There is something I would agree on! Learn to ask questions! Should you apply your advice and ask me directly? Well, Glassdoor is fun as well isn’t it?
You are right. There is not always one answer. Yet we must choose one and align everyone behind. It does not mean that other answers are wrong. So, your idea might be useful, but it’s probably not the only one. Don’t worry, one-day people will vouch for you and line up behind your plan. But, remember that’s not the essential thing…
The most important thing is whether we (as a TEAM) have been successful.
Have you been part of our success? I think so. You should be proud. Take care, Bud.
Chris
