Pros
Corey - I promised months ago I would write this. I'm sorry it's taken me so long to get around to doing it. Maybe it's for the best, as it's given me clarity to be away for a few months now. I joined StormWind in February of this year for all the right reasons. After having lived away from my family for 10 months and narrowly not missing the birth of my daughter, I came upon an intriguing job description. The day of my interview was memorable. I remember sitting on the wooden bench, approached by sharply dressed stranger after stranger offering me water. Eventually I accepted the offer of someone just to make the offers stop! Talk about a great sales tactic. My interview was awesome. I immediately knew this was the right place for me when we began discussing books, and "Extreme Ownership" by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin came up. It was at that point that I knew I was around a young and passionate group of leaders and visionaries that would challenge and stimulate me. The first few weeks at StormWind I spent hours in addition to my normal work hours going on a wild scavenger hunt frantically trying to complete by "little black book", which is a really thoughtful way of forcing you to get uncomfortable. By the time I was done (and completed first in my 'class'), I practically knew everyone's name, and vividly remember a profound conversation I had with an employee, again after hours, that will stick with me forever. Forget about all the fringe benefits that people list in their reviews. In my own opinion, these are people that fail to see the big picture. Tom and Corey genuinely care about every person under their tutelage and that is really how I felt at StormWind. Everyday I felt like I was getting paid to get an MBA. The expectations at StormWind are lofty, but not impossible to achieve. If you can ignore the electronic crack buzzing and ringing in your pocket for a few hours at time, it is totally doable to hit the targets that are set in front of you. Taking a job at StormWind is a lot like making a New Year's Resolution to be better. Some will fail. Some will be better, and rather than learn from the experience that maybe they aren't ready/willing to put in the work, they'd rather cast blame anywhere and everywhere but themselves. The dichotomy of Stormwind is to lead, you must listen. To not only read, but WRITE. And to be a teacher, you must also humble yourself to student. There is a non-denominational prayer group that voluntarily meets on Friday. Even as an atheist, I encourage you to attend. When I first showed up to work at StormWind I had zero inkling it was a faith-based organization, and the term really gets a bad rap. In the spirit of getting uncomfortable, I encourage everyone to go and rather than worry about what everyone else gets out of said session, or the view they espouse, use it as a period of reflection. When you're grinding 60+ hours/week to improve yourself, a period of reflection is almost necessary, again in my opinion.
Cons
My cons are limited, but of course there are cons, and I will list them, though based on reviews, I believe they have been corrected, or are in the process of being corrected. 1. Music. I don't get it, and I don't like it. I understand it helps a lot of people get through the day, but in my experience it was too loud, and I honestly would rather be able to hear the buzz of the floor, and throw headphones on if I am working on demo follow up materials. The 2nd startup I went to after leaving StormWind did the same thing and it drove me crazy. 2. Sales ops was severely lacking in my opinion. It was very hard to tell who had worked a deal, opportunities were rarely created unless a deal was in the final stages, and people did a poor job of notating demos, meaning you would often be stepping on others toes. Because everyone is so eager to grind, people would often call leads others were working. I really feel that could be shored up by giving each person X number of leads in every timezone, say 50, to work, and then as those leads were either vetted, or discared, have a scraper running in the background that would dump more leads to work into a person's queue, so that they always had a significant number of leads to work. I do believe #2 was being addressed as I was leaving, but I do not know the outcome of some of the changes they made. 3. Healthcare was not cheap. Healthcare is not cheap, but I think even more so for folks who have a family or are the primary breadwinner, insuring your family is expensive, to the tune of several hundred dollars more a month than I am paying now.
