Gainsight Reviews

First of all, thank you for writing this. While I've done a poor job driving success for you, I can tell you care and want Gainsight to be better.

Second, you are 100% right. While your experience may not be the same as everyone else's (and I'm not saying that critically - just focusing on yours), your experience is your own and that means we have failed you. Third, on that note, I saw your post on Friday and didn't stop thinking about it all weekend. To be honest, any time a teammate, a teammate's family member, a customer or an investor has a bad experience with Gainsight, it's like a dagger to my heart - a sign of my personal failure. While you listed that you approve of my personal performance, I do not approve of my performance in your case, in that I have failed to deliver for you. I own that. But thanks to your concern and constructive input, I don't have to wallow in that failure forever - I can get started on fixing it. A few broad points in response to your post: 1. I do want to bring data to bear where possible to assess broader themes. As you may know, our CCO runs a monthly Teammate Success NPS survey in the post-sales team (which we'll expand eventually to the entire company). In addition, you are probably aware that I do regular "roundtables" with 4-6 teammates at a time (including 6 a week ago in St. Louis with ~40 people total). Some points I hear are consistent with your observations and some are unique. 2. That being said, no matter what the data shows broadly, your experience is your own and data doesn't take away from that - or from the work we have to do. 3. A massive "root cause" of these issues (in my opinion) is that we have an open req for a VP Teammate Success and it's taken a while to hire the right person (100% on me but I'm actively working on it). 4. On the flip side, another deep point underlying your comments is the fact that we want to embrace a truly geographically distributed culture at Gainsight. You rightly point out some areas where we fail at living up to that, so thank you for shining a light on areas where I need to improve. Glassdoor has a character limit so I'll include brief responses on each point: * Unlimited PTO usage: I haven't seen data as to whether very few take it (we don't track but should), but I know we need to do more to encourage. I try to share my vacations in transparency. I think we can do more here vis-a-vis recognizing people for taking PTO. * 401K match: I haven't seen data that most of our employees are young across all offices but regardless, we increased healthcare and dropped matching to be competitive with other cos of our stage. In addition, I do believe startups often end up being "age biased" and I want to be a welcoming place for those with families and those of all ages. I recognize this doesn't help you though, and I'm sorry for that. * Market pay: We did a study a year ago and one of the top priorities of the new VP will be to refresh data and adjust as data indicates. Thanks for highlighting this. * Promotion time: I checked on the VP you mentioned; first request from exec to promote VP was 3 months before promotion. Our promotion process is deliberately long to ensure parity but I recognize how that can be frustrating and I'm sorry for that. * Same 5 people solve issues / execs in one office: We need to get more diverse in our decision making. We are hiring a VP Services and plan to have that person spend a huge chunk of time in our St. Louis office. I am actively looking at VP Teammate Success candidates in St. Louis. As you may know, our CMO moved to NYC which will help make us less California-centric as an exec team. We need to do more here - great point. * Constant reorgs: I do think growing companies reorganize regularly to align to new needs so I don't shy away from that. I also think a reorg doesn't mean the old org was wrong - usually every org structure is good for some things and bad for others. But we need better institutional memory to make sure careers progress through org changes - big part of new VP TS' job. * Time zones: I hear you on this one and I also think it's a core part of our model. Many startups with Bay Area funding assume the only place to hire is in Silicon Valley. We have embraced a distributed model which means we can give opportunity to folks everywhere but it comes at a communication / time zone cost. I think we can get more efficient to reduce the burden though so I look forward to brainstorming on this. BTW I think coordination with Indian time zones affects some roles in GS a lot but not all. Can't thank you enough for writing this. Only by pushing - even in critical ways - will Gainsight become the company we all want it to be.... MoreLess

Thank you for sharing your experiences. While I still think we have a long way to go in our mission, it's nice to hear the positive feedback. I agree that as we scale, the test is whether we keep taking time to know our team as individuals - something I'm personally passionate about.... MoreLess

Great input. I think you capture the pros well. I do think that our company is not perfect but we try to own that imperfection when it shows up (e.g., in negative feedback) and act on it. To that end, I agree with your comment on our flexible work policies. The positive is people can work from anywhere but the negative is you lose the feeling of everyone in one place. We need to get more strategic about events and other forums to bring people together while not losing the flexibility we have today. Keep the feedback coming!... MoreLess

Thank you for the kind words. I'm glad to hear your experience thus far has been positive. While I still think we have a long way to go to get to the company we want to be, it's good to hear affirmation along the way.... MoreLess

Thank you for taking the time to write this. It's clear from the thoughtfulness that you put into this that you care about your former teammates and want things to be better. That being said, I'm so sorry for the pain I've caused you in your time here. I own this personally as CEO and it's my fault that you had a bad experience. I probably will never be able to repay that to you (though feel free to reach out to me if I can) but hopefully I can pay it forward with other teammates. I truly am sorry. This post brought me great sadness. Our process when we receive Glassdoor input (good or bad) is to post it online internally to spur more input/dialog. I received several posts in our public forum internally (Chatter) and several more submissions through our anonymous feedback system. I won't go into the specifics here though I'm glad to, but please know your post sparked good dialog and you should be proud for trying to make your former company better. I wish you the best in your future endeavors. Again, I truly am sorry.... MoreLess

Thank you so much for taking the time to share input on your experience.

I want to take a few minutes to comment on the post to share my point of view. I want to continue to do a better job of being transparent with potential teammates about our philosophy at Gainsight. I don't believe in selling people on working at Gainsight. Instead, I aspire to be as clear as possible about what it's like to work here so teammates to whom our style appeals will join us. For some historical context: * Not everyone knows this but we were founded originally (before my time) in Hyderabad, India and St. Louis, MO * In particular, our co-founder and still VP Engineering is in Hyderabad * As such, we have always been a global company from day 1 * Due to this, when I came in (February 2013), I leaned into that and embraced the idea that we want people to be able to work from wherever they want to * As such, we have 6 offices today (Hyderabad, Bangalore, St. Louis, Phoenix, Redwood Shores and San Francisco) * We also have dozens of people who work from home (Florida, North Carolina, Boston, New York, Austin, Portland, New Jersey, ...) Some of this comes down to my personal beliefs: * I believe great people are scattered all around the world and we have an opportunity to build a world-class company by being flexible * Commuting is a major work-life balance impediment so we try to make it very acceptable to work from home (whether you have an office near or not) * In my informal conversations with teammates, this flexibility is a widely cited benefit of working at Gainsight In terms of our engineering strategy: * Per above, we've always had 100% of engineering in India * I worry about splitting teams up due to the loss of efficiency (e.g., I think many companies do "multi-country" development poorly) * We are definitely not in India because of cost; in fact, our R&D spend as a % of revenue is far above our peers at our stage; we believe in building a sophisticated product and are investing to make that happen (and I think the poster observed the results of that in terms of our product leadership) * In my almost 20-year career of managing thousands of people, I've never worked with a more customer-focused, innovative and responsive engineering team in my life than I see from our team at Gainsight In terms of culture: * We strongly believe in our 5 values across offices * However, beyond that, I am against imposing a certain style of culture on everyone * I fundamentally think life in different places is different * For example, I'm an NFL football fan (Pittsburgh Steelers!) That might work in Pittsburgh :) but not everyone in the world (or even in the US) is a football fan * We try to celebrate and recognize each others' cultures instead versus imposing a single culture * We believe phrases like "cultural fit" are often unintentional code for bias * We vehemently believe in diversity (as a part of our company value Shoshin - Beginners' Mind) In terms of work/life balance as a result: * This is an important point * I think this is one of the downsides to the model we have * However, I know we can do more to ameliorate this (in terms of better planning, async tools, etc.) * Your post has inspired us to focus more on this I'm a big believer that you have to build the company that's right for you and your team and not assume your company is right for everyone. As such, I don't push our model on others or assume it's the right one universally. However, I will say that more and more companies are trending toward a distributed workforce (for reasons above), so the skill-set of working in a distributed model is valuable on its own. You definitely learn that at Gainsight. Thank you so much for the excellent input and for the dialog it spurred!... MoreLess