1) All the talent has left: in the past months the entire senior staff has deserted. Heads of departments across sales, finance, operations as well as the COO and COS have all left. Everyone has either left for new roles or "family reasons" which is code for "we can't stand working with the CEO anymore". Everyone who is still here is busy interviewing and has one foot out the door already.
2) CEO is the problem: To summarize, he is incompetent, delusional, and a hypocrite. He runs the company through Claude, outsourcing judgement, vision, and direction to AI chatbots. It's so laughably apparent when he sends slacks that it's all slop, and everyone makes fun of him and just ignores him.
3) Toxic work environment: Everything the CEO does is so performative. He preaches 9-9-6, but sits around doing nothing and comes to meetings unprepared, reusing the same 4/5 phrases (how are you inverting the company today, is this the best thing we can do for the company, don't be a cog, compress timelines). He sits by the entrance every morning to see when people come in and your manager will get a nasty slack if you are 1-2 mins late. In the afternoon he'll set up an "outside meeting" where he'll go to the gym for 4 hours and then come back at 6:59pm to see who is leaving at 7pm. The surveillance culture terrible and he has a few insiders who will rat people out.
4) Low pay / low reward: The CEO tries to sell everyone every week during all hands on how much the equity is going to be worth, and uses that to justify the below average pay. The equity isn't going to be worth anything, the guy is just sooo cheap. Our travel stipend is so unreasonable that when we obviously can't find the right rates he'll yell at us and ask "did you really need to go visit that client? What did you do there that justifies the cost?"
5) Don't value people: The just don't care about the people building the company. There's no training, no ramping, no retaining. The CEO only celebrates people who are agreeable to him and will kick people out with very little notice or explanation. He's vengeful of people who leave and take roles elsewhere or start their own thing.
