LendUp Employee Reviews about "management"

Pros

LendUp Account Management was certainly a learning process. I learned a loted a loted a lot about what I do like and don't like in a job and in management. I have been thoroughly impressed by the employees who care about the mission and truly want to help sub-prime borrowers. There was an intelligent, awesome group of people on the Customer Insights team that made coming to work enjoyable--I made some lifelong friends. LendUp does an inexplicably good job at hiring very smart, over-qualified people. In-office happy hours on Fridays also garnered a sense of camaraderie. Great office location.

Cons

LendUp did a great job of cultivating a good, fun, healthy, etc. culture when we were small (<110), but as the company grew, culture did not pivot well. This was especially true on the "Customer Insights" team when they tricked us into becoming a call center. Expectations were not set (although claimed they were later down the road). I felt like a hamster on the wheel or a horse with the carrot on a stick that is unattainable. I was definitely willing to work hard for that next step on the ladder, as were most of my peers. It was clear they were incentivizing people to make the calls needed by promising promotions/to move you to a different team but would never actually promote/move people out of the team because they needed people in their call center. "Management" (I use the term to mean the disparaging few, not all) would constantly pick at you at make you feel worthless if you couldn't keep up with the expected call numbers every single hour of the day (why did Person X make 110 calls today; he usually makes 150). At times, I felt it was a toxic working environment--from the micromanagement to the asinine gossip to making one feel guilty to stay at home when truly sick, etc. My intelligence as well as my peers' was not put to best use. Furthermore, in terms of management, it also seemed ridiculous and a complete waste of very capable people who should be doing other things than counting the number of calls I and my peers make every minute of the day.

Pros

As a startup employee you typically want to look for a product the customers love, a solid growth trajectory and an experienced executives. LendUp has all three.

Cons

People management is largely unresponsive to people who are underperforming. Slackers on the in crowd get to hang around and vest while you're heads down working away.

Pros

Entire team is super bright, extremely passionate and very, very nice. Management is open with information so everyone knows exactly what's needed to succeed.

Cons

Can't call it a con, but there are high expectations from all your colleagues because they're all working their hardest and a level of stress that comes with meeting all those expectations.

Pros

The mission is truly admirable. The exploitation of the payday loan industry is an issue that few others in the space have even attempted to address. Because of this, the company *generally* tends to attract social justice - minded, down to earth people.

Cons

Management refuses to be self-reflective, even now it seems when the company is falling apart, largely because of self-inflicted damage. The extent to which the company underpays its staff, especially is customer service team, is deplorable. Every dollar less paid to the front line teams is of course a dollar more in the pockets of exec team.

Pros

Given my last review was voted 'most helpful', I wanted to update it after ~1 year at the company for both insiders and potential candidates to get a more transparent look at what's changed since we are a company that is going through rapid change. 1) Still engineering/data driven. This means we focus on building and investing in technology first. There is a reason why we are scaling orders of magnitudes better than big banks! Had a recent hackathon for the first time and talented folks across departments built some really things - servicing tool written in purescript, real-time chat bot, static analysis tools, etc. 2) Our social mission is very clearly the top priority and last say in decision-making. It is really easy to see the passion some of my coworkers have for making a difference in our customers' financial lives. It is personally incredibly rewarding to be working for a company that is making such a huge difference. In 2016, we saved customers an estimated $18.3m dollars (this study is available on our blog) and raised their credit scores by a significant amount. We can't save our customers that much without our business is doing well- we are able to undercut and provide better services than existing lenders, and we choose to do so 3) Transparency- It's clear to me that the executive team and management places a big emphasis on gathering feedback and listening to employees concerns. If you read some our more recent reviews, you may be concerned but Sasha and Jake have addressed and discussed every single one multiple times (will elaborate on this more in the con section) 4) Comp/benefits are getting bumped up as we get more funding! We are more at the median level now but to be more competitive hiring, we should be in the top quartile. 5) Unlimited vacation - people are skeptical of this but it's real and people take advantage of it! Most people I see take the equivalent of a week off per quarter. 6) Diversity and inclusion. The people here really care about diversity and inclusion because they are central to our mission - we are trying to bring in a (huge) group of people that is currently excluded by our financial system. This has led to redefining our company values, renaming all conference rooms after influential women/POC, formation of a Black Lives Matter book club, and employee-initiated volunteering. 7) There has been recent bad press from the CFPB ruling but if you read what the violations actually were, it is amazing we have so few and minor mistakes in such a heavily regulated and scrutinized industry (most of the violations were failure to display certain text disclosures back when LendUp was super young). Heck, even TransUnion and Equifax got slapped with a fine recently and their compliance/legal departments are probably bigger than our whole company. This is no excuse but I can say with integrity that we've never made a product decision that hurts the customer.

Cons

Focus on eng/data means other departments often get overlooked or left behind. This is a general problem in tech, not just at LendUp. Specifically, most of the recent negative reviews have been from folks leaving from our Customer Insights/Account Servicing department. This is incredibly unfortunate- as someone who has worked closely with many of them on a day to day basis I know how valuable their product expertise is. From talking to some insiders, the gist of what happened is we hired an incredibly bright, excited (and overqualified) team at low pay in exchange for career opportunity. The day to day job is mostly account servicing and handling customer calls and through this you get valuable exposure to our users and the product. I've seen many of our CI agents get promoted and moved around into different teams with paths to become data analysts or work in product. There is a LOT of career growth opportunity here but not everyone gets this same opportunity because at the end of the day we still need folks to answer calls and there are a limited number of internal positions open. The result has been high turnover on this team and a decision to outsource most of our servicing to Richmond, VA where it is much cheaper to hire. I still believe the future is bright for the company but it's unfortunate we lost some good people from CI (most left before a year) who left disgruntled and bitter at management.

Pros

the company provided lunch options every day

Cons

tons of bureaucracy and horrible management

Pros

The #1 reason to work at LendUp is the commitment to socially responsible lending. The software engineering is solid, and there's some truly innovative ML going on. LendUp could be the first profitable financial company with a conscience. It's also great to have career tracks for technical roles that don't involve moving into management.

Cons

Working at a startup is a double-edged sword. You get more done and move faster than at big companies, but unless you're personally invested in the mission or are willing to play the long game for equity payouts - the effort level and hours required could be rough.

Pros

- Salaries are finally somewhat competitive - Still (mostly) true to the mission

Cons

- Senior management does not appear to have a strategy or vision for the business; priorities have changed almost every quarter for the past 2 years - Nobody outside of the C-Suite has any insight into details about LendUp's equity (number of shares outstanding, valuation, ...) - Too many career levels and titles considering the company has < 100 employees

Pros

The team in Richmond is very friendly and engaging. There are a lot of fun and optional group activities outside of work. The company is very efficient with their use of technology to communicate. This is a great opportunity to learn more about the financial world.

Cons

The upper management has a tendency to push the training on long-standing employees who are not paid as a manager when they should be. The company was not wise with their use of revenue and overspent it on marketing. There is not a lot of opportunity for in depth analysis/creative problem solving. It can seem like it is not mentally challenging enough.