Klaviyo Reviews

Pros

Clear company vision, and clear goals for my role that align with that vision. Not only that but managers really care about your personal goals as well and work to help you to work towards those.

Cons

Honestly no cons. Really love working here and hope to for a long time.

Pros

I have been working for this company for over two years and can say I still enjoy working here. The work life balance is more then I could ask for and I enjoy the role I am in. Things are constantly changing so you have to be willing to adapt quickly, but it keeps you engaged and learning. The pay is reasonable for what we do and I have always had great managers while working here.

Cons

Wish there was more of a career plan for growth, but I believe they are working on that.

Pros

Flexible "unlimited" time-off Decent salary Great ICs - smart, sincere, hard-working Product makes marketers happy and effective

Cons

CEO lacks desirable leadership qualities and promotes burnout culture. After touting how in-person work is the future and bringing the entire marketing org together for a week in Boston he stopped in (under duress it seemed) to see the group for about 90 seconds and had almost nothing to say to us, did not try to connect with people, did not attend team events. Every time he speaks at a town hall we were left with feelings of certainty about direction - the only thing you leave with is a feeling that you need to keep working harder/more/longer (to what end I am not sure), that instead of celebrating and acknowledging good work and people its more valuable to pick it/them apart and find flaws and blame. Layoffs came on the heels of super positive performance reviews, coupled with lackluster or zero pay raises - with high inflation it was a pay cut. IPO readiness is the only thing they seem to be even remotely interest in being ready for. Lack of prioritization despite ad nauseam talk and hollow promises about doing less to focus more. Chaotically and constantly shifting priorities leaving employees with a feeling of whiplash and wasting time/effort switching from one thing to the next.

Pros

Individual contributors across the company are intelligent, kind, hard working, and interested in learning and improving. Company has incredible product-market-fit and is continuing to grow very fast, competitors cannot keep up Teams have very high levels of ownership, you'll be responsible for full-stack including infrastructure with help from other dedicated teams, and be able to learn a lot about building software. Company has been handling tech debt and re-designing lots of systems to take advantage of modern advances, so you will learn the right way to build high scale systems.

Cons

RTO policy has not been consistently communicated, this has created a lot of anxiety for people who are unsure about their status as a remote employee Opportunity for advancement is difficult path to navigate, promotions seem to mostly follow a calendar-based approach (after 2 years you get a promotion), and the performance review process has changed so many times no one is exactly sure how it works. We have several missing leadership roles (C-level and just below) that have been either a revolving door or vacant for extended time. Base salaries are not very competitive, they did an industry pay analysis years ago and promised to release the results, but then never did (so we all assume they didn't want to tell us we are underpaid and they know it).

Pros

Individuals working there are generally great (anyone lower than director-level), compensation is fine.

Cons

Senior leadership has spent the last six months or so making choices that are openly hostile to employees. Forcing return-to-work for previously remote positions (and messing it up so badly that an entire region got cancelled a week before people were supposed to go in), outright stating that they want a less "consensus-based" culture (aka, employee concerns will be ignored), frequent grandstanding meetings with no real purpose. Employees who had gotten glowing performance reviews only a few weeks before were laid off with insulting and vague language to justify that completely avoidable choice. The majority of hiring for rank-and-file employees are now only in regions with offices (Denver and Boston, which obviously limits the hiring pool tremendously for no legitimate reason), but director-level or above roles have been filled almost exclusively remotely. Hypocrisy and a complete lack of trust are constantly at play in most decisions coming from the top. A frequent refrain is that "micromanagement is underrated." I used to recommend Klaviyo and offer industry peers referrals, now I just tell them to stay away. It's a huge difference from where we were a year ago, and in an entirely negative direction.

Pros

Decent initial offer and fringe benefits. Most individual contributors are talented and kind, so you will have an opportunity to learn from them.

Cons

All the negative reviews in here are really true. When looking at reviews, filter them by the recent ones and you will notice a pattern. Most leaders are either power-tripping, do not care, biding time until market picks up for better opportunities or IPO, absolutely out of touch, incompetent to run a larger organization, yes-people or all the above. Sadly, this organization is an insult to all the people who joined to build something cool. Initially, it seemed like an open, honest, genuine and happy place of talented people. I am unsure if something changed as the organization grew or if the founders (and their egos) became more involved or if true systemic issues took time to surface or got triggered by growth. If you join this place, you will end up with no bonuses, inequitable or no raises or RSUs, broken promises of career growth, remote-unfriendliness, a façade of openness, sugar-coated answers, ever changing priorities, and an eventual feeling of being stuck with no respite. It may eventually change, but again, please do yourself a favor and look for the most recent reviews and trend

Pros

Product has a good future, LOVE LOVE LOVE our product as a user myself and love the community/connecting with partners/customers We seem to be doing well financially despite market and layoffs internally

Cons

When I started there was a lot of investment in developing talent that may have not done the exact same thing before but were smart and hustled. Now leadership tends to prefer hiring externally because of resume cred but end up hiring people who aren't willing to innovate or do the hard work we need a leader to do The leader of the people team is shady - she'll say one thing to my face and then I got poor feedback through the grapevine. I've also witnessed her bully employees and say one thing to their faces in a meeting and flip that the next day. They have no idea how to operate like a grown company I expected this to be different given I've worked in some scrappy non-tech/corp places in the past.

Pros

Strong top and bottom line growth. The ICs and lower management are strong.

Cons

Leadership and culture: In 2022, Klaviyo made what I believe was their first layoff, which they refused to call a layoff. During the company meeting, leadership shared they didn't consider it a layoff and had no plans for future layoffs. A few months later, the same thing happened with another organization. A few months later (early 2023) it just happened again, this time, impacting parts of the company we were recently told were completely safe. Prioritization: - Companies with effective leaders are able to prioritize and align teams/orgs around a company vision and mission. Klaviyo's company priorities consistently change and they end up having too many priorities. Most know the saying if everything is prioritized, nothing is prioritized, and that's very true here. Klaviyo is a growing company but challenging place to work for a number of reasons and the lack of transparency, even thought hey preach transparency, may be it's downfall as employees lose trust.

Pros

Free books. Fun teammates. Unlimited PTO

Cons

As a company who has a “transparency” core value, the politics are as opaque as you can get. After a round of layoffs earlier in the year, we were told explicitly by the ceo that there would not be anymore, along with incessant messaging of being financially healthy. Fast forward three months, and 10% of the company was laid off? With no answers as to why? In a disorganized, “duck duck goose” style, where random ppl from each team were let go? How about cutting some of the bs incentives or not giving LAUGHABLE raises to overworked ppl that honestly felt like a slap in the face. A lot of putting band-aids on gunshot wounds. People are being blatantly lied to and lured into a false sense of security so klaviyo can take advantage of their talents and hard work and give them the boot after they’ve used them up.

Pros

- My salary is good. - Work with a lot of smart engineers and PMs. - Some interesting and challenging problems. - Company is doing well and is positioned to keep doing well if we can get our act together internally.

Cons

- Company leadership overall is a bit of a mess. - Lots of big ideas about how to get the founder famous that mean nothing to most people. - Process is frustrating for many teams, leadership likes to pretend we're still a scrappy group of startup folks who are ok burning themselves out, seem to forget 98% of the current company aren't going to become millionaires when we IPO.