Great Place to Build Higher Levels of Psychological Pain Tolerance
Pros
Technology appears to work well, though some parts seem surprisingly still too manual Some great people work there Offices were beautiful when they were open pre-pandemic
Cons
I worked at Expanse and was a member of the nearly entire marketing team that got laid off a few weeks after the pandemic started, a few weeks after the CEO seemed genuine in an all-hands meeting when he shared with us that the company wouldn’t lay off a single employee. Surprised to see another review post here written by a current employee that inaccurately attributed the lay-offs to being performance related. Clearly, they don't work directly with the CEO and HR. When I asked the HR representative about why I was being let go, she assured me (and then re-assured me) that it wasn’t team or personal performance-related. It was a change in direction for the company, she said. And my understanding from the CEO's communication was that the marketing team was a mis-match for the stage of company Expanse is at. He called nearly 10 marketers with great expertise putting start-up, small and mid-sized companies on the map "big company" marketers. Maybe he was confused by the fact that the companies many of these marketers helped build are actually big now. We’ll never know. Bad reviews come when you don’t value your employees and the people that helped take your company to new heights. In my time there, what I witnessed was that Expanse got a high-performance marketing team that the CEO and an immature sales leader didn’t ultimately appreciate, nor did they care to understand the machine that was being built. Oddly though, the CEO would tell us how much he did appreciate our work and then suddenly the pandemic hit and he laid us all off. What the leaders at Expanse also had for a time was a mature and integral adult in the C-suite who called out bad behavior in the ranks, and as far too often happens in Silicon Valley, paid a price for it. One male executive at Expanse has a reputation of being a bully, particularly to women. The CEO knows this. Two women I worked with also shared their stories with me about their abusive encounters with this male executive. After spending time with him and the CEO, I was honestly relieved to be let go. These are the kinds of leaders who talk more than listen and think they know more about how to do everyone else’s jobs than the SMEs. They are also the kinds of fearful and insecure leaders that need to constantly criticize and tear people down in order to lift themselves up. It’s something you eventually become immune to in the course of a career in tech. If you want to build up your pain tolerance threshold and immunity to working under that kind of leadership, Expanse is definitely a place where you should spend some time. The CEO has a lot of growth work of his own to do if he hopes to truly expand Expanse in healthy ways and take the company to its full potential.
