Company & Founder Are Lying Frauds - Anonymous employee Vyykn Employee Review

The Vyykn mission is ambitious, far reaching, challenging, noble and extremely exciting. Disrupting the multibillion dollar bottled water paradigm and aiming to solve our broken municipal water infrastructure by creating an alternate multi-layered hydration ecosystem is not for the faint of heart. The mission, the company, and the founder have frequently challenged me in ways outside of my comfort zone and beyond what I thought I was capable of. Aside from the reward of working for a company that can truly make a global difference, discovering my potential and being encouraged to do so is the thing I am most grateful for. The company, and by the company, I really mean the founder is not afraid to entrust any employee that takes the initiative to try his or her hand at anything that allows them to grow within the company and as an individual. Like most startups, you wear multiple hats and Vyykn embraces trying on as many hats as you can handle.

I don’t know who the previous review came from and I don’t want to do a line by line dissection of what he/she wrote or what their motivation for doing so was. However, I do want to refute what was written and offer my perspective as a current employee of a year and a half. I was drawn to Vyykn and its mission from the moment I heard it was moving its headquarters to Ketchum. I flew to CA to introduce myself to the founder who was working at a TED event in Berkeley that Vyykn was sponsoring. I showed up and I said, can I help? He said yes and I worked the rest of the weekend learning and then promoting Vyykn’s mission. When I returned to Ketchum, I called the founder who was based in Boise at the time and said “I want to work for Vyykn, can I come down and learn more about the company”. He said “sure”. I drove to Boise the next day and he spent three hours with me going the Vyykn business model. I was blown away with what he had been developing for three years and I asked him if I could have a job. He challenged me on my word selection – ‘job’ but offered me the opportunity to prove myself. I asked him what would I be doing. He said, “I don’t know, that’s up to you”. I was confused, slightly annoyed with the lack of specificity but thoroughly intrigued and motivated to do whatever it was going to take to secure a position with the company. I worked for free for the first two months as the company wasn’t hiring at the time but at the end of the two months the founder offered me a job, I have been paid ever since and I haven’t looked back. How I came to work for Vyykn is somewhat unconventional. Everything I have experienced working for Vyykn since then, by comparison to what I have been used to, has been somewhat unconventional. The founder in many ways is unconventional. To some people, myself included, unconventional can be sometimes be uncomfortable. What Vyykn, and in particular the founder, have taught me in the last year is that in the middle of unconventional and uncomfortable is where the good stuff is. Long hours, sometimes seemingly unsurmountable challenges, sometimes failings, are part and parcel of the journey and are a critical part of anything meaningful. Vyykn is as ‘big picture’ as it gets and it requires a leader and in this case a founder, to stay true to the vision with a relentless and sometimes ruthless adherence to a course that serves the mission. To misconstrue actions, intentions and an ideology as the previous reviewer has done in my opinion, is to not appreciate the scale of what he and Vyykn are attempting to undertake and what will be required to get there.

It would appear to one that this is the best company one can work, which actually drains gradually after you get to know the management and the style of running the company. It had the best employees along with the best management, currently ruled by hypocrites and narcissists.

Since there are more cons than pros. Let me brief it in points. 1. As the first review said, The cofounder is indeed a disaster and the best micromanager you could see. We have been lied to by him and the COO every day, employees encounter manipulation at every hour and false promises were their favorite way of procrastinating the current problems which affected employees and their family. 2. Ironically, it is a start-up company with a negative revenue for more than 7 years. The previous employees have never been paid and always made to work in uncomfortable jobs (for which they are not hired for). You could see a marketing manager doing a mechanical job, software engineer building the sauna or doing carpeting and many more. In a start-up, everyone should wear different hats, but one cannot put different heads, it would diminish the quality which the company rarely cared. 3. Of course, the Vyykn machines/apps/FILTERS does not work. Every day there would series of calls from the clients crying about their problems and the least solution from the company is to provide a temporary solution which might work for few hours. Eventually, the clients are the ones who get used to the frequency of the product's efficient usage and helpless about the situation. 4. Not a single major standard certification to the products developed. The school like projects are often seen as great products in the management's fantasy head and subsequently released to the market without any proper testing or evaluation. 5. The specialty of this management of 2 PERSONS is: they can dislike or like, doubt or trust, fire or hire, disagree or agree, criticize or praise employees/advisors/clients in the matter of milliseconds and come to conclusion without proper evaluation. There is no strictly adhered managerial/technical meetings or discussions or even a second thought about the fallout. 6. Mechanical employees (carpenter, installer, welder etc) work in an unsuitable environment. To draw the picture a teen carpenter work in a woodshop in Idaho winter without proper ventilation and heating system. For which the founder advise would be to love the journey.