Pros
The absolute best people you’ll ever work with. Very intelligent, humble, and just easy going people. The culture is very lax in terms of sales expectations. Company onsites and QBRs are a lot of fun and it’s a great opportunity build customer relationships and your business acumen. The whole company uses GPT which I do believe is a huge win. We have a lot of headwinds against us in the marketplace and feel that getting us all licenses was a great business decision. I love the company culture - both the old school 8x8ers as well as the new folks from Twilio. I have 0 regrets working at 8x8s because I love the people here so much, despite all the challenges I’ll get to in just a minute. I appreciate our leadership team and recognize the challenges they inherited and are up against.
Cons
We have significant headwinds that should not and cannot be ignored. The fuze m&a that took place essentially put us back in the stone age financially. Yes on paper we are profitable and look to be fine but there are many indicators we’re not out of the clear. It was such a poor trade deal I genuinely wonder if the previous CEO received a kickback for it. Our biggest AI partner was recently acquired by our competitor. While that doesn’t mean immediate changes it significantly undermines our strategy. Product market fit is lacking and product is working to climb out. We have new offerings around CPaaS but margins are so low on consumption based services. Lots of issues with our core product that need to be addressed. Many of these are preventing 8x8s ability to go upmarket. The financial headwinds are most definitely not over. We’re trading at about a buck fifty per stock and our recent comp plan was written by a 3rd party consultant that either hates sales people or has recognized 8x8 can’t afford to pay industry standards. They also can’t afford to keep the team properly staffed - it can be hard to take PTO because there isn’t coverage.