no grownups - Technologist Leeo Employee Review

It is possible that Leeo’s talented team built a solution to a problem that nobody had. It is also possible that the company took too much funding, and hired too many people, on the basis of exuberant forecasts, or no forecasts at all. It is possible that the visionary skills required to conceive of a company’s first product are not the same as the managerial skills to market that product, design a functional management structure, and develop its second product. None of these is condemnable — that happens to startups. However. Ultimately, what did the company in was a lack of marketing. To launch a consumer product in a new category requires sustained investment in brand advertising, and a steady hand to ride the first year before channel partnerships come to fruition — but the founders supplied zero strategy, human support, or budget to selling the product. The company dispatched with its marketer shortly before product launch, never replaced him, and left a probably able, and definitely over-staffed, marketing organization to spin with no executive sponsorship or advertising budget. In the face of this total breakdown, it’s no surprise that product sales never materialized. The resulting panic proved the undoing of a senior management who had never developed any long-term plans or expected to have to solve problems. This is not to say that the company did not have many other, deeply troubling, structural defects. But if the product had sold well, most of these issues could have been tolerated, papered over, or even ignored altogether. There are plenty of completely dysfunctional companies that nonetheless survive because they have revenue (looking at you, Microsoft). But without revenue, all the other issues contributed to fatal paralysis.