Thread by @vcstarterkit

Going to try this with twitter. If you’re a VC, founder or journalist, DM me your thoughts on the Away piece and I’ll anonymously post your response here

(and I’ll commit to keeping your identity confidential)

https://twitter.com/sriramk/status/1203046370162040832

Founder: “I think this is just market forces at work. There’s not a lot of incentive treat support teams as anything other than cost center. Engineers on the other hand ...”

VC: “Any article that begins by citing the square footage of the house the subject of the article grew up in, in order to make the reader less sympathetic to her, is a hit piece.”

VC: “What I’m curious and conflicted about my own answer is: if the CEO was a male is this story 10x bigger, 10x smaller, or the same?”

Founder: In addition to treating employees badly, there were clear business mistakes that indicated leadership’s failure to learn. These issues destroy organizational resilience and increase investor risk.

Responsible founders have noted VC responses. This will [hurt deal flow]

Founder: While it's fun to fuck around on Twitter, I don't waste time reading articles that are the Silicon Valley's version of celebrity gossip voyeurism. No one's reflecting over anything they actually want to do after they read this.

Founder: Calling cancelling PTO a career development opportunity is some hilariously evil shit

Founder: If your support emails go from 100 to 4000 in a day. You’ve failed your CX team. It’s pretty obvious there wasn’t better organization around new product rollouts. From leadership.

Founder: VCs only defending the CEO’s behavior and not showing any empathy for workers will hurt long term VC returns by reinforcing VC-is-evil mentality; many more workers now calling for unionization because of it.

VC: I wonder if all else being equal — literally 100% of it, including Korey’s behavior and the realities/growing pains of a hyper growth consumer startup during the holidays — that Away's culture would be toxic without the slack policy

Founder: “When an employment situation turns out badly (and there are often 2 sides to these things), I think female managers often have a lower bar to be perceived as stepping out of line, so make enemies much faster”

Founder: “$181M raised.

$40K salary.

Easy solution here.”

Millennial Consumer: feels like a hypocrisy to sell “what they believe” to consumers and then treating their employees the opposite way

Founder: “I used to work for an abusive founder who behaved very similar to Away’s CEO. Their behavior drove away all top talent, prevented long-term thinking, hurt quality of customer service, and ultimately destroyed the company (losing tons of investor 💵). Shit doesn’t work.”

Founder: “I think it’s being defended by investors talking their own book and by those recognizing their workplace is actually probably similar.

Unfortunately, it seems It’s an all too true portrayal of many office dynamics.”

VC: “I was about [to] tweet about how my med school, banking, etc friends make me and my most hardcore founder friends look soft. We live in a bubble”

Founder: “I read that story and I freak out at how almost no one is pointing out how immensely inefficient the CX operation was. So obvious it needed to be re-organised and/or scaled up, if only temporarily.”

Founder: “I thought there were some unsuitable things for sure but the article came across as biased and one sided. I don’t really like reading these “dirty laundry” stories.”

Operator: “You have a 4,000 CX email backlog and your first reaction is to yell at CX and not product? Maybe google "5 whys" before doing a rail and posting to Slack at 3AM”

VC: “Articles like this are depressing because they make everyone look bad: the founder, the company, the tech industry... but also the "journalist," their publication, and the media.

No winners here, only losers.

What's funny is I bet Away's sales won't see a material impact.“

Founder: “I don't care if this was a hit piece or legitimate grievance -- I think about it as a textbook illustration of how not to build dedication and cooperation in your org for the longer term.”

Founder: “It seemed more as a hit piece on Slack (as a tool & it's CEO)”

Founder: I lost a lot of respect for founder friends who tweeted they didn't see a problem. It was insanely abusive and there's no excuse. You could argue it's a hitbpiece I guess... But if the slack messages were posted without commentary, it'd be just as bad.”

Founder: “I had a good amount of employees appreciate our culture a lot more after it.

Oh and now I'm embarrassed to own an Away bag.”

Startups employee: “Definitely has some real cringe parts like “career development opportunities.” But if we took any reasonably large company, started with a narrative in mind, and cherry picked internal comms screenshots, an equally scathing piece could be written.”

Founder: “The pressure this [...] CEO ended up putting on their team was inevitable the second they raised huge amounts of OPM for a suitcase retailer.”

Founder: Something like this happened at our company but we quickly understood that we would lose talent and stopped it right away. The employees actually trusted us more when they saw that this was fixed based on their feedback. It was caused by high stress and we [adressed it]

Someone with a connection to the CEO: “I was impressed by how quickly the broad social circles she runs in - which are quite powerful & very wealthy - went into damage control mode. Unilaterally deemed a full hit piece before 10am. (I do agree that it was a hit piece)”

NY Investment Banker: “Her offenses were nothing compared to the stories from uber or any other start up. The talking on work sponsored slack chat rooms is a ridiculously ‘millennial complaint’”

VC: “It’s careless to criticize the work ethic of these folks without acknowledging the incentive gap. CX rarely has meaningful equity, so they were unlikely to ever see real upside. Success takes hard work, but it has to be genuinely opt-in and compensated/incentivized.”

Founder: “It seems like she is the scapegoat for an overall culture that she may have initiated — but that other top level people perpetuated and then used as a noose to hang her by (which isn’t fair for anyone)”

Engineer: “what could the leadership team have done at the time to help this avoid spiraling? Rather than see salutes to the hustle, I want to know what VCs weighing in publicly would have done to help the company if they were on the board.”

VC: 40k salary doesn’t mention that every employee [who joined prior to 2017] had option grants likely worth six digits. Given the valuation development of away its fair to assume that some of those cx employees made more than McKinsey consultants over the past 3-4 years.

Former CX Employee: those messages were employee abuse. I got the impression of a founder that would rather overwork the team to death instead of scale appropriately and take on a little extra cost. It's what happens when support teams are forced to be “high touch”

Former CX Employee (at another startup to be clear) [continued]:

Ultimately this is basically a story about how a founder sold CX employees on a vision of them being core team members when really they were cost centers that were always going to get worked into the ground

Founder: “Yeah it's critical but it's sadly typical. Cults form around founders and they don't hear the feedback that they are fucking up. They sleep well at night thinking they made the hard decisions to get the team in shape.”

Founder: “I don’t understand how anyone can justify passive aggressive comments and restricting PTO as a career development opportunity and a more or less abusive CEO though some parts were defo unecessarily stretched out (eg part on twats)”

Operator turned VC: “The CEO crossed the line, no doubt, but she should not quit. The manager of CX team, the one who wrote 1300 words - real problem. Either ask for more employees or stand up to the CEO and shield the team. Only way to scale is to have competent managers”

Operator: “ Gender is irrelevant. This is about power and privilege. Toxic asshole is a gender neutral term. She doesn’t appear to be running a sustainable business, esp not at tech valuations. Selling luggage isn’t tech — It’s pets.com — a marketing arbitrage”

Founder: The issue with it is that actual systemic problems end up getting trivialised by making issues out of non-issues — for ex “She sends emails at 3am" is a non-issue vs "they've created a culture that quells dissent/disagreement with the top management" which is an issue

Founder: “The culture at Away seems a lot like what the Samwer brothers created at Rocket Internet...and they’ve actually funded Away through GFC. Not a surprise: like investor, like founder.”

Operator: “I’ve lost so much respect for many VCs today. They're wholly out of touch with the real world. I’ve worked for multiple hyper growth companies and never seen insults and demeaning statements from execs (to CX teams). Feedback was transparent and respectful”

Founder: “A lot going on.

CEO should be stressed, but response was clearly over line.

Poor CX management making lame excuses. Doesn’t excuse CEO but also true.

Using only former employees as source is bullshit for any article.

Interesting CEO has 80% approval on GD.”

VC: “many VCs are reading it and recognizing the culture as the one they would love to see across their portfolio.

it reads like an anti-slack ad and i bet companies will look into how to compartmentalize logs, prevent leaks, etc.l

VC: “Startup successes are miracles and it takes much sacrifice to get there. I empathized with SK reading the piece, although she seems to be tone-deaf and mercurial”

Founder: Despite many in the Valley claiming to have read Jim Collins' Good to Great, most are still trying to be Steve Jobs and not Darwin Smith: jimcollins.com/article_topics…. Ego blinds people.

Founder: You can have high standards and accountability without being an asshole.

Unless the company is solving a difficult or worthwhile problem (iPhone, clean tech, space, etc) then an intense culture is wholly unnecessary and simply an extension of the founder’s insecurities

Founder: “There’s literally 0 reason for a CEO to EVER call an employee braindead. That is abuse.”

Founder: “While running an ops business can be frustrating, founders already get leeway for that from employees.

The level of passive aggressive behavior on display is inexcusable, saying "startups are hard" paints other founders with the same brush.”

Founder: “Startups are hard, you could lose your job, lose your sleep, lose your [financial] stability. Being yelled at constantly (IRL or virtually) is not part of the equation”

Former e-commerce exec: “Talked to colleagues that are in the e-comm space. They don’t see an issue with the CEO. In fact, most popular response was, “this is why you outsource CX to the Philippines.” CEOs wear this shit as a badge of honor, not as a mark of shame.”

Founder: “If you want amazing CX, invest more on it. If the CS load is rare and event driven, have the whole company huddle on the problem. The CEO is probably not in the bottom decile. My board would have been fine with her approach, so long as revenue was up and to the right.”

Going to call it here. Hopefully this thread gave you a perspective that you wouldn’t have otherwise heard. This was an interesting experiment, thanks for the inspiration @sriramk

On a positive note, I don’t think I got a single DM that was nasty or personally attacked anyone involved which is encouraging

There were ~25 additional DMs that came in after this and I've included some of those responses in a newsletter post here:

vcstarterkit.substack.com/p/getting-carr…