I’ve been at Sedna for several years. My appointment here predates many people at the company as I was already here when we barely had any funding to run on. It is therefore with great regret that I say the following: the company is absolutely doomed and has already hit the wall, as proven by a 20% cost reduction by means of redundancies. The cons are too many to mention but I will limit myself to three. Number one: lack of true leadership. As the old say goes, the fish rots from the head. Sure, they call themselves ‘senior leadership team’ but there is nothing senior, nothing leader, and nothing team about them. They work in isolation, all of them intent on tripping each other up and come out on top. At some point, 30% of leadership was female, now it is 0% (discount HR who, for some odd reasons, always is female anyway). The three female leaders, all from ethnic minorities, had it worst as plenty of scapegoating went round to the point of each of them simply giving up (well one was sacked on the basis she was a bit aggressive which is ironic if you consider who is left). A very petty cohort of males always do their best to sideline any female leader. Guess what? They succeeded! I feel quite strongly about these things as my partner is in a very similar situation in her own company and notices exactly the same behaviours exhibited there too. Another reviewer below mentioned the clique around the CEO. Yes! It is impossible to penetrate and now it is all a brofest. Even though I am male, I have absolutely no interest to participate in their petty behaviours. I have spent the holidays looking for a job. Number two: they promote their friends, internally, even as they have absolutely no experience in doing what they are supposed to do. Vanity titles and head of this, head of that, lead, and so on are dished out to make people happy, but if you are a single contributor, and almost all of us are, how can you be called ‘head’ or ‘lead’ or ‘manager’? Additionally, we now have product and engineering combined (an absolute disaster and whoever thought that would be a good idea needs to go back to management school, if they ever were there to begin with), operations with next to zero experience, sales does not sell (but somehow it is only the salespeople who are thrown under the bus), we burn through cash like there is absolutely no tomorrow, and they even had the nerve to sack 30 odd people just before Christmas. Remember, you can 'cost save' all you like (start from the drinks and snacks and dinners maybe before you get to the people?) but you cannot generate revenue out of nowhere. Number three: the people function is primary-school level and wastes time asking us employees how to make Sedna better instead of grabbing the issues and resolving, or better still preventing them, if possible. Silos are everywhere. Revenue is full of duplicitous individuals (with some people actively boasting about having got others sacked at the end of November), spuriously booking ARR which then finance cannot even invoice because customers get angry during the implementation phase (another joke). Supposed Customer Success is rife with individuals who only really look after the customers they like with the result that others are poor adopters and then churn. But for some reasons their failings always become engineering’s own failings, as if we were the ones promising lies at sales stage or as if it were down to us to get them live. It is extremely sad that the company should be in this state after so many millions of investors’ money. To the brothers and sisters who got booted just before Christmas I would like to say this: you were the lucky ones! You are no longer on the sinking ship! Hopefully I too will disembark soon.
