Captora

1.0

21 Nov 2016

Anonymous employee

Recommend

CEO approval

Business outlook

Pros

~ Interesting product concept (if it could actually be executed upon) ~ Free lunches ~ Some founders appear to have since departed, which may have helped fix most severe leadership issues

Cons

Product Issues: ~ Product that was being sold by the sales team did not have the core capabilities that were promised to customers. ~ Customers needs and requests frequently ignored by senior product leaders, who preferred to implement features that were not requested while ignoring ones that would actually serve the market. ~ No process / best practices for developing and delivering an enterprise-quality product to market ~ Customers rarely informed of product changes or the larger roadmap, leading to great confusion when new features were released without notice or system "updates" would change Leadership Issues: ~ Founders did not share a common vision and frequently worked at odds with one another. ~ Senior staff had almost no communication with the team, even though everyone worked in one large room together for most of the first 2 years. ~ Micromanagement of product features by founders and constant changing of the product direction on a daily / weekly basis ~ based on the next great idea led to a shambolic product and frequent rework or redo's. ~ CEO out of touch with what was happening with the company and the product and did not express interest in listening to staff about it - his focus seemed to be solely on sales. ~ Pettiness among some senior staff who spread falsehoods and some outright lies about other staff members.

Captora Response

Thank you for your review. While it seems a bit dated we, as a company, value and appreciate any feedback as an opportunity to get better in our quest to build the next generation SaaS company. I joined Captora a little over 18 months ago to lead its engineering team and it has been quite a ride. There is a new team in place covering all functional areas of a modern SaaS company including development, dev ops, quality assurance, technical publications, UX and design, and technical support. There is also a new engineering leadership team bringing experience from premier Silicon Valley companies both startups and large corporations. Engineering staff is nothing short of awesome. We work hard but we also work smart, we argue, we choose the best path forward and we get behind it and execute with great precision. Our culture is based on trust, transparency, and direct communications and we have been blessed with similarly minded team members that we keep finding and hiring. Captora was launched around a vision of a digital platform for the top of the marketing funnel and in the past 18 months the product has come a long way from V1, focused primarily on market fit, to V3, enterprise ready and featuring 99.99% uptime. We are now releasing new features every two weeks with zero downtime during deployments. We have a pipeline of patents and a flow of innovations that we can add to a solid product base created thus far. We have been successful staying true to our vision while balancing customer requirements and engineering creativity. As a member of an executive team I spend a lot of my time communicating the vision both internally and externally and translating it into product specifics. And the customers respond well through buying, renewing, and staying engaged. I am sorry that your experience at Captora was less than stellar and while I cannot attest to how it was two or three years ago, Captora is a very different place today from what your review describes.

One of the most divisive, poorly-run startups I've ever encountered - Anonymous employee Captora Employee Review

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