Growing pains - Anonymous employee Paddle Employee Review

2.0
24 Jun 2022
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The team is amazing, people are extremely intelligent and fun to be around. Unlimited holidays actually work without anyone thinking less of you because you decided to take a week or a month off. Being digital first is a major plus. The team is flexible and you can collaborate with people from all over the world.

Cons

Ever since the last funding round and Profitwell acquisition, the company is losing its culture. Decisions are made top-down without communication to the wider team. No space for genuine feedback to those announcements or changes either since most of the "higher-ups" don't even know who the team is and haven't booked time in (it's impossible to find time with them too). Diversity has gone out the window, we've lost a lot of women in the past few months and nobody seems to care. "We're working on it" is what we always hear but no tangible examples have been put forward. Everyone is focused on just delivering things instead of taking care of the team and culture or making sure both teams (profitwell and paddle) find common ground. American culture is notably different and there's no plan on how to handle that. If the company is aware and doing something about it, it is not communicated to anyone other than the ones talking about it. Teams are losing their ability to strategise (even though it's an essential aspect for some roles) because "higher-ups" weren't trained as managers, don't know how to communicate, and are accumulating decisions that maybe they shouldn't. Some Profitwell employees came to Paddle with a much higher seniority than they should when comparing to the Paddle standard, simply because Profitwell was already calling them senior/specialist/etc. There needs to be clarity around what to expect from everyone. And that's not mentioning the salary differences, that's a whole other issue. All of this is feedback was given to managers time and time again in the past 2-3 months from different people in different departments and they're happy staying where they are simply because "the economy is bad" and there are no additional resources to focus on these things AND on delivering what was promised. Seems to me like the current management doesn't know what to do when a company is in a tough spot, but the individual contributors are the ones that suffer from it.

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Paddle Response
3y
Thanks for taking the time to share your experience. We’d love to work with you to address some of these points and improve things for you and all other Paddlers. If you feel comfortable, please reach out to your People Partner or to Hanna Smith, our People Director. Christian and the rest of our leadership team have started to share more updates in our regular company-wide All Hands, we hope this has provided more clarity. We still have more work to do and we’re committed to ensuring Paddle is a great place to work for all 360+ global employees.

Explore other reviews about Paddle

4.0
20 Apr 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
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Pros

Enjoyed the people. Good communication culture.

Cons

Tough to move upwards. Lots of moving parts when it came to product offering and internal goals.

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