Section Reviews

4.1

80% would recommend to a friend

(25 total reviews)
avatar

Greg Shove

84% approve of CEO

70% positive business outlook

Section has an employee rating of 4.1 out of 5 stars, based on 25 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an excellent working experience there. The Section employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Education industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

25 reviews
2.0
1 Jun 2022

Went way downhill

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

-The work is/was rewarding. When I joined, it was a mission-driven company that prided itself on offering accessible business education. -The perks and benefits used to be great – a stipend to Public Goods and Doordash every month + excellent healthcare. (The DD/PG perk has since been revoked.) -Flexible work environment -Most importantly, the people are hardworking and extremely talented – S4 does a great job at recruiting/hiring kind, talented people

Cons

Just FYI - the reviews on Glassdoor aren’t the best representation of the culture at S4, especially as of late (2022). Things have changed *a lot* in the last 4-6 months. -People have lost trust in leadership. initiatives and directives are pivoted far too often, and there’s a general lack of human understanding for how that affects the staff. It’s an odd dynamic where it feels as if the company knows how to operate empathetically and they claim to do so, but their actions don’t line up. -the company boasts about valuing diversity and inclusion, and while they do do a good job at not over-representing cis white men, there are other elements to D&I where they fall very flat, like pay equality. And no matter how hard you fight, they are unrelenting. -the irony with S4 is that the company produces sprints on how to upskill your business sense, but fail to actually learn from the very content they make, specifically Product Positioning, Branding, People Management, and Productivity. These are all areas where S4 has a lot of room to improve. -In general, the company just feels like it doesn’t know who it is or what it stands for anymore. The culture very much feels flailing and insecure, and most employees have lost trust in upper management for these reasons.

avatar
Section Response
4y
Thank you for taking the time to provide feedback and for calling out the incredibly talented people working at Section4. We understand your concerns and appreciate you clearly outlining them. You're right that there has been a lot of change for us in the first half of 2022, and we're working on quickly adapting as a team and making improvements as we move forward. This includes some of the areas you outlined, such as benefits, DEI, and continuing to build trust. If you would like to discuss any topic in greater detail, please reach out to any of us.
5.0
5 Nov 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

I started here as a consultant, drawn by Scott’s name. I studied at NYU Stern and couldn’t get into his course. So I applied for a consultant role to get the tenets of his course content but delivered in the workplace. I really enjoyed it and embraced the opportunity, really reveling in my responsibilities and trying to help ease logistical burdens where I could. After a few months, the leadership team reached out to see if I was interested in joining full-time and here we are. For context, I've transitioned my career a couple of times and have worked for very large, multi-national organizations. The mix of social impact, business-alignment, and team culture was never completely right. Section4 manages to balance all of these successfully. - All team members here are smart, engaged, and self-sufficient. They have a craft and have honed it well. People care about their work and are driven to contribute. - Individual contributions matter and go visibly towards final company deliverables. Aside for a few tweaks from fellow staff, your work is not watered down or held up in "buy-in" processes. You can see your impact in our work/strategy and you are recognized for it. I’m also empowered to come up with solutions to my own problems. “Just run with it” is a saying that comes to mind. - It’s very entrepreneurial and fast-paced. Ideas are welcomed. The projects I’ve worked on have mostly been all new things to the organization (or something that didn’t get attention due to bandwidth). If you like discovery and implementing new things, this is the place for you. - With diversity and inclusion, representation here is the best I’ve seen. Our core team is half women and we have openly LGBTQ+ and POC representation. We’re also self-aware and know our shortcomings and spend time on structural changes to address these issues. - I help set bigger picture strategy but also participate in the execution. At our stage, no one works only on project management, reporting, or analyzing spreadsheets. For example, I helped design a student onboarding experience including capacity scoping and resourcing. But I was also part of the team that administered the experience. - People are (politely) honest, transparent, and very oriented towards making our start-up succeed. This tone was set by our founder, Scott Galloway, who’s known for speaking his mind. With many of my previous employers, there was a need to “kiss the ring” with senior execs and tenured staff. Refreshingly, not here.

Cons

- Future career paths are unclear and largely dependent on the success of the company. There are no defined paths towards promotion/career progression. - Compensation and benefits aren’t competitive. There is also no 401K. Probably similar to other start-ups, the equity and future hope of upside make up a large part of the comp. - We work 50+ hour weeks and are always available. For me, there’s been a lot of “key man dependencies” so I can’t easily share my tasks with others. On the plus side, I can see that I’ll be working very long days in advance. This may be somewhat alleviated in the future with additional hires and tech improvements. - Though I have only been an observer and haven’t been directly involved in hiring, we are slow and patient to hire. Since we’re early days in our start-up, each new hire greatly adds to and affects our culture. We’re happy to be patient until the perfect person comes along to offer what we’re looking for. At times, though, the burden of understaffing gets overwhelming.

3.0
11 Mar 2024

Great product, but that's it.

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- remote - great pay - talented, collaborative employees - interesting product - prior to layoffs, compensation and benefits were great

Cons

- Scott Gallaway was verbally abusive to employees in internal meetings and in front of hundreds of customers. Management refused to address it in a timely and appropriate manner. That led many employees to lose respect for upper management. - The CEO/mgmt decided to pivot the product several times within a short amount of time (like 2 pivots within 6 months). The CEO didn't seem to use a lot of data to make decisions. He said once or twice in All Hands meetings that he made company-wide decisions based on his ideas/thoughts/feelings, not data. We definitely could tell. Hearing it admitted in All Hands meetings made us lose further trust in the CEO's abilities. - We also saw that the sprints taught one thing and leadership did something else. Why teach strategies you don't believe in using? - Multiple layoffs (including laying off the entire HR team) - Customer-facing team members were cut (for a product that was heavily customer-focused) - CEO brags on LinkedIn about how he's cutting full-time employees to replace with contractors - Customer-facing DEI efforts mostly led by white men who showed their bias frequently.

Viewing 1 - 3 of 25 Reviews

Glassdoor has 27 Section reviews submitted anonymously by Section employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Section is right for you.