Provi Reviews

I think what largely attracts people to working at startups can be summarized into three things: ownership, teamwork, and transparency. 1) Ownership, as a result of working in a smaller company size, is deeply felt by each employee. Factually, there’s often an equity package as part of total compensation. But more deeply, there’s a sense of pride that comes with the work you do because you have the ability to truly make an impact – on the direction of the product, the brand voice, the internal processes, the company culture – areas that employees might not otherwise have the ability to influence in larger companies where the bureaucratic inertia prevents that opportunity. 2) Teamwork, possible through quick collaboration, nimbly made decisions, and deep alignment, in the absence of red tape and internal politics. Startups often having the reputation of ‘disrupting’ an industry, cultivate a sense of purpose and identity in which employees band together to outpace the incumbents. 3) And lastly, transparency. Disillusioned by the smoke and mirrors that might exist at larger organizations, startup employees expect more. They have a desire to pull back the curtains and engage in honest, frank, sometimes, vulnerable conversations with each other in the service of continuous improvement. If you’re hoping to see any of these ‘hallmark’ attributes of a startup, then you should never seek employment at Provi. Instead of experiencing ownership, teamwork, and transparency, be met with micromanagement, backchanneling, mistrust, egos, blind arrogance, and cunning deception. It is a leadership team that has difficulty trusting one another, let alone its employees to do work in their respective areas of expertise. And while self-confidence and bravado are certainly expected when launching and scaling a startup, it is toxic arrogance that runs rampant within the C-Suite and SVP/VP levels at this company (specifically those that have always been Provi employees, not part of the SevenFifty acquisition). Lacking self-awareness is one thing, but what is happening at Provi is intentional and gross ignorance that borders on disrespect, sometimes even crossing that line. Employees are gaslit, silenced, or minimized in their roles when they don’t assimilate to the group-think mentality. There is a Pavlovian reward system in which those that continuously agree with their leaders are elevated, while those that dissent are moved aside. In fact, there are individuals who had no problem complicitly watching this happen to their colleagues, and are now experiencing it themselves. There is zero room for healthy disagreement, new perspectives, or expanding strategy. The Leadership team has proved themselves incapable of displaying any humility, holding fast to their own ideas, but when unsuccessful, taking zero accountability for their failures. Employees are not seen nor valued as assets worthwhile of retention and growth, but rather operators that carry out tasks. It is a totalitarian environment in which creativity and innovation are stifled because its CEO operates from a place of fear and condescension rather than inspiration. The leadership team’s pathetic attempts to unite employees towards a common goal are often hollow, near-sighted, and lack strategic rigor, resulting in unmotivated employees who see right through flimsy, half-baked objectives. It’s a group focused on moving chessboard pawns to ‘hit numbers’, instead of considering its next several plays that create compounding success. And if it cannot get the basics right, then do not expect the leadership team to remotely know how to set goals and track progress against DEI-related initiatives. While startups have a generic reputation for ‘raising the bar’ on DEI standards, as they simultaneously ‘raise the bar’ for their industries, make no mistake that Provi is a hiring echo chamber that supports a specific and narrow demographic, deploys the twisted use of a ‘model minority’ who may not even realize they’re being exploited or feel worse when they do, while internally they continue to be marginalized in subtle or flagrant ways. It is truly sad how many employees feel they must come to Glassdoor to leave their reviews as a result of the personal anguish and strong disappointment they feel for a company they had high hopes for, coupled with the lack of internal processes and leadership to provide the channels necessary to facilitate these conversations in constructive ways. If, by some miracle, this company ends up successfully surviving a decade from now, it will not be a heartwarming narrative that ‘we accomplished this together,’ but rather one of brute force, deceit, and disrespect. For people considering joining Provi, do not sacrifice your values for employment here. For people currently at Provi, your objective is to simply survive and look for the nearest exit. In a different time, I would have said persevere, rally for change, but there are better ways to spend your energy. And for those who have already left or been laid off, honor the difficulties you faced in your time at the company and let it be a chapter of learning, enlightenment, and a step towards a much brighter future. For any recruiter or hiring manager who may use Glassdoor reviews to evaluate a prospective Executive or SVP level candidate to better understand the ‘culture’ they created explicitly or complicitly, may this be of qualitative use in that evaluation. And for any recruiter that wants to better understand why an employee is trying to leave Provi, it isn’t that it’s ‘just not a good fit’ or they ‘want to be challenged in new ways.’ It’s the mental and emotional exhaustion of working for a company that possesses no sense of purpose, no strategy, and severely lacks a moral compass – be kind to them, they’ve been through a lot.