More like a cult than a workplace - Anonymous employee Goodiebox Employee Review

Thank you so much for taking the time to share your experience. I am very sad and deeply moved reading your words and I want to give my deepest apology to you for having to leave Goodiebox with those feelings. Nobody should feel this way and particularly not after working at Goodiebox. I am particularly sad because I believe something went terribly wrong somewhere as I can not recognize Goodiebox and our team in your description. That is not in any way to take away your feelings. I trust every word you write and I believe every feeling but I also know that is not how or why we created Goodiebox. Please, let me try to give some context on why. Since we shipped the first Goodiebox back in February 2012, we have had one clear purpose and one clear ambition: Building a happiness company and making people - our members and our team - happy as often and as much as possible. One happy moment at a time. However, being a happiness company does not mean that we are free of challenges. On the contrary, Goodiebox is a start-up and we are on a mission to change the world and that means travelling on a bumpy road with lots of challenges and difficult tasks for everybody on a daily basis. This is the start-up reality and it is different from most other older companies that are building on maybe generations of work. We don’t have that opportunity. Having this reality you could rightfully make the argument that we should also have the highest salaries in the world, but unfortunately that is not feasible. No startup can afford having higher salaries than more established companies. That is the premise for most start-ups. We need to be better and get more done with less than any of the established companies. Otherwise we don’t survive. In this context, we do evaluate salaries across Goodiebox teams/functions not only with other start-ups but in collaboration with external experts equipped to facilitate such comparisons. Based on their expert knowledge and our experience onboarding new teammates, we can say our salaries are not low in comparison to companies similar to ours. Having said that, there are areas of our business in which we continue to develop and polish in regards to pay – specifically within career paths which is a priority we are currently working on. Our ambition is to make our team members as happy as possible and getting a fair salary will always be a part of that. Just as important there is no difference in salaries for Danish and non-Danish employees. We have 27 different nationalities among our close to 150 employees and they are all fairly paid based on skills, experience and function and never on whether they are Danish or non-Danish. I feel both extremely proud and grateful for being fortunate enough to have many very skilled young employees who daily make a significant impact on Goodiebox and how we operate as a company. They are given a chance and they make the most of it and as a consequence of this they climb the start-up ladder gaining more responsibility, more skills and higher salary. What our team does every day is by no means easy and can also be chaotic from time to time but the ambition is always the same: We want to be the happiest company in the world – with the happiest team daring to inspire and empower people to live a happier life one happy moment at a time ultimately making the world a happier place. This creates amazing opportunities for everybody in Team Goodiebox. It also creates a constant state of change and a healthy dose of chaos. That cannot be avoided. So, we need and want our people to be exceptional and we do bi-weekly reviews on how our team is doing (anonymous reviews) and regularly have honest and transparent conversations on how things are going and how best to help our team members grow as Goodiebox grows. We always wish for our team to stay and develop as long as possible knowing full well that it can be challenging and that we make mistakes. But, we try to get better and better and we have already shared your feedback with our team so that we continue to develop to ensure that we improve and stay transparent so that we can handle situations like yours much, much better. Personally, I have made many mistakes in the past years and unfortunately I will most likely continue to make mistakes going forward but the happiness of team Goodiebox is my highest priority and I will continue to learn how we going forward can avoid other people leaving Goodiebox with the same feelings like you. Therefore I would also be very grateful if you could drop me a mail on rasmus@goodiebox.dk so we could have a talk and I can understand how I and Goodiebox can get better and how we ended up in this unfortunate situation. I would deeply appreciate that. All the best, Rasmus, CEO