Learned a lot, and a great mission - Engineer Twelve (CA) Employee Review

The people here really care; if I'm having a bad day, am under water or have been really cranking out good work, people notice and check in or call it out. There's an air of authentic compassion on every team that translates to coworker's relationships and the work we do. No matter what skillset you bring to the company, you can really feel you're making an impact. Being a startup, there are also a lot of areas to jump in to help, and in turn gain a new skillset. If you see a gap or embers burning, people appreciate you asking and trying to help out. The benefits are also really sweet; great pay, good equity, 95% insurance coverage, wellbeing benefits like OneMedical and Wellhub, office snacks and meals, team bonding budgets -- the list goes on.

Twelve is a startup that pulls together scientists, oil & gas professionals, and scrappy jack-of-all-trades kinda people; so there are a lot of personalities and ways of doing work to navigate. This can be a pro (if you can take it as learning) and a con because it can be difficult to communicate and collaborate sometimes when things are really moving. Speaking of which, Twelve is fast-paced: there is a lot to do, priorities shift as funding does, and every day is different. It can be tough at times, but the pendulum does tend to swing back around. If you can hang with the crazy times knowing that, it's easy to manage!

The work is cool. If they could make it work how can you not be impressed by a world made from air? The employees genuinely believe in the mission.

Nicholas has no idea what he’s doing. He and his co-founders built a company based on their belief that they knew more than anyone else and never trusted their leaders to make decisions unless they 100% aligned with their thoughts. As first time founders and leaders they needed to rely more on their senior leaders to be experts in their domains. The three of them also fought constantly in a way that was palpable. They knew finances were bad and still just kept spending money on a jet fuel plant that was just not going to happen. The board and investors should have removed Nicholas from his seat long ago. The amount of money he insisted on spending on his million dollar ad firm run by his friends was embarrassing and did nothing to advance the technology or get the fuel plant built faster. You can make it pretty but if the product is going to fail, maybe that money could have been spent on extending runway.