Disorganized and Dishonest - Anonymous employee Rockset Employee Review

2.0
18 Aug 2022
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great technology, smart people, interesting use cases and good comp plans.

Cons

The company is a cult of personality that absolutely revolves around the CEO and the Chief Product Officer. As a result, their hands are in everything, micromanaging even the jobs of other management to the extent that they can't effectively do their jobs. The amount of "big brother is watching you" vibe is unreal. Everything is tracked, every call is recorded and reviewed, and feedback is often voiced as "here's what you did wrong." Don't ever be seen disagreeing with the CEO or CPO, or you'll be on the naughty list. There're definitely people playing favorites here. In addition, there's no proper management for super important business functions. For instance, there's still no CFO. There's no COO dedicated to making sure everyone is working effectively. The Sales team has no consistent message or playbook. As a result, a lot of things are extremely disorganized and hectic. People are often not on the same page, and things are partially communicated to only a small portion of people who need to know about them. This makes even simple tasks confusing and difficult, since there is no standard way of doing things. Lastly, the leadership has been dishonest, not only with employees, but also with potential customers. Many of the features advertised on the website either don't exist or are half baked. Top management often sells non-existent features to potential customers, and then cracks the whip on engineering, forcing them to build the features in record time, all the while telling the customer, "we've always had this feature, and it's been tested and used by other customers."

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Rockset Response
3y
Hey there, First of all, thank you for the feedback. We are sorry you didn't have a great experience at Rockset. Critical feedback like this allows us to get better and we always take them seriously. We are a small team that tries to stay nimble. Our product development and release processes allow us to release a slightly newer version of our product every single week. Unlike traditional enterprise software companies that have 1 or 2 releases in an entire year, we move fast and hustle to get new functionality out quickly. It is a strategic advantage a small startup like us have when we compete against massive incumbents with deep pockets. While it might seem chaotic on the surface, our engineering team has worked tirelessly to make it happen using the wealth of knowledge they have from scaling systems several orders of magnitude larger in their prior lives. We agree with you that this type of fast paced iterative environment is not for everyone. It is unfortunate that you found this environment confusing. Our ability to continuously innovate and iterate quickly is actually one of the biggest reasons we continue to attract top talent across the organization. We are not yet big enough right now (Aug 2022) to have dedicated sales enablement resources or a COO or a CFO. At our scale most of these roles are not yet a full-time job and are best served by someone playing that role part-time or external contractors. Nothing unusual here - just another startup trying to be scrappy. Seems like you thrive in an environment with a lot more structure and we cannot wait for our company to grow up and get there quickly. The only part we strongly disagree in your entire review is about being dishonest. Our <4% annual churn rate and 300+% net dollar retention numbers speak for themselves. So, seems like you are terribly mistaken in this regard and we welcome you to talk to any of our customers directly to hear about their experience with Rockset.

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