Shoelace

1.0

3 Jul 2020

Recommend

CEO approval

Business outlook

Pros

- If you are in one of the higher-up positions, you can do whatever you want and get away with whatever - Fun culture at a superficial level because free booze and food - Some well-connected angel investors

Cons

My experience working at Shoelace has scarred me. All of the negative reviews are completely spot-on. It is run by a small group of friends that do not care about your skills, how hard you work, or your dedication. They do not care to set you up for success unless you are one of the core group members (spots are all taken, btw). The moment one of them decides they don't like you, they leave you out of activities, ignore you, stop inviting you to lunch, and completely set you up to fail. It's easy to tell yourself you don't care about their opinion because this isn't high school, but it feels like high school there.. and it hurts. I have been sitting with these feelings for well over a year, and although I have moved on to bigger and better, I still think about my time there and how much it affected my confidence, mental health, and overall well being. The product itself is wrought with bugs and barely works behind the scenes, and once you realize it's just tinkering with Facebook with no real personal touch, attention, or effort, a company can easily do this by themselves. The C-suites win you over at the beginning. I remember in my interview, they said "we already love you. we just want to get you to love us". But all that positivity and care soon disappears and you realize they're barely ever around (which is abnormal of a company that size) and they truly don't care about you at all. However, if you are a young, fresh, naive, attractive woman, the founders will ensure you receive plenty of (potentially unwanted) attention. They are slimy, misogynistic bros that never really grew up so they don't care if you have either. They seem to just be there for a good time and treat everything as a party. Their attempts to have actual meetings and scrums and roadmap discussions are phoney and baseless and immature. Truly surprised to see this company is still up and running. It feels like the clock is ticking and the party will wrap up soon.

Shoelace Response

Thanks for your insightful review, there are many things to be addressed and I would encourage you to reach out to willow@shoelace.com if you would like to talk directly. We are very proud of the diversity and inclusion efforts of the team and having recently conducted company wide performance reviews, I can confirm that nothing close to this sentiment has been shared with us. With that being said, I’d like to address a few points you’ve made. 1. Shoelace has implemented meaningful feedback strategies across all levels of the team to ensure that when management is unhappy with your work they have the platform to tell you in a constructive way. This feedback structure allows employees to give constructive feedback to their managers/leadership to ensure they are getting the coaching and support they need to succeed. 2. We’ve worked on new offerings and app improvements to add more value to our clients and create a more personal touch by moving away from a SaaS company to a tech-enabled service. 3. Shoelace’s C-levels, management, and leadership have been working very hard to create a work-forward company. We agree that there was too much emphasis on social aspects of Shoelace, and while we are surprised that this drew so much ire from you, we are happy with the new process driven meetings, research and feedback based decisions, and that more transparency into the company allows for more accountability. 4. We have implemented lots of feedback structures into the company culture including regular 1:1s, bi-yearly performance reviews, and exit interviews. Because it can be hard/scary to come forward about mistreatment to the person doing the mistreating, the team knows they can always approach HR with concerns and we conduct anonymous surveys/Q&As so employees can give honest feedback and ask questions. 5. I would encourage you to reach out to willow@shoelace.com if you ever experienced/witnessed any inappropriate behaviour towards the women/individuals in the office as this is a matter we take gravely seriously. Again, thank you for bringing these issues to light, I hope your new role provides a better experience than Shoelace was able to.

Scarred employees, skewed priorities, slimy leaders that default to bullying, buggy "product" - Operations Shoelace Employee Review

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