uBeam Glassdoor Review: "Not sure if uBeam even qualifies as a company."

Some of you may not be familiar with Glassdoor - an online site where you can anonymously post a review of your job, your company, or your interview experience. The collated information is made available if you sign up with an email, and for sizable companies there can be a good amount of information as to company culture and even salaries. Somehow they must make money from all this, I guess at some point you hit a paywall or large companies pay for anonymized/collated data, because in June of this year they were purchased for $1.2 billion. 

I've checked in to the uBeam section of Glassdoor every few months over the last couple of years, and there's only been a couple of reviews posted. They were mildly positive with statements such as such as "5 star. It feels like working in a lab in grad school..." tempered with "Sometimes there is uncertainty with any project and there may be a sunk cost mentality." to the slightly more negative "3 star. No technical leadership at high level". For whatever reason I checked in today, and saw a review had been posted yesterday with the title:

 "Not sure if uBeam even qualifies as a company."

So this got my attention, enough that I finally signed up for a Glassdoor account so I could read it in its entirety, and oh boy, was someone unhappy with their time at uBeam. Before you read this, I'll be clear - this was not me, nor is it anyone I know (that I'm aware of).

Just to repeat:

"Not sure if uBeam even qualifies as a company."

Former Employee - Anonymous Employee

Doesn't Recommend

Negative Outlook

Disapproves of CEO

I worked at uBeam full-time

Pros

Dog friendly office

Benefits paid for 100%

Cons

Like being paid to sit and witness the ramblings of the mentally ill. The female head of the company was beyond delusional, and while I felt sorry for her at times, her delusions gave a complete false sense of reality. This company is more about a small group of engineers getting paid to run experiments than anything else. There is no chance this company will survive or succeed. Not a good career move in any way. I regret ever starting this job.

Advice to Management

She should have never been allowed to run this company - not even for one day.

So that would have been an interesting exit interview...

But, on a serious note, when someone asks me why I started my blog, what you read above is one of the many reasons. When people take jobs, they move their families, change their direction in life, and make choices that have huge impacts which ripple down for years or a lifetime. New entrants to the workforce have no experience of what is normal, good, or bad, and they don't have that metric to tell them "something is wrong". They can learn bad habits or miss out on opportunities for mentoring by talented seniors, or building a career in a worthwhile company. More senior staff can spot the warning signs, but they can be subtle until you're on the inside, by which point you've swapped your kids schools and put your old house on the market, and the practicalities of life force you to stick with a frustrating job for a couple of years. 

uBeam were getting so much glowing and uncritical press coverage (though, hats off to the few journalists who did a solid job) that the public perception was not what I saw as the reality, having experienced it from garage prototype through Series A and the next round. At the very least potential staff had to have some possibility of seeing an alternative view before making a major commitment. In some ways it was the excerpt from Adam Grant's "Originals" about Perry, which in no way resembled the reality I had lived, that was the straw that broke the camel's back and made me write the first blog post. So well done Adam Grant, I can now say your books are not completely pointless.

Update Nov 6th: I just realized that the two 'Pros' in this review were things I had a strong hand in setting up. For the year I worked in the Santa Monica office from its opening, I would bring in my dog Jackie on a regular basis, and so set the precedent. On the 100% benefit coverage, this is something Marc Berte and I had implemented, and fought for when incoming CFOs tried to kill it. We believed that happy, stress free, healthy employees were worth more to the company than ones worried to go to the doctor or stressing about paying bills. The automatic reaction of the MBA class to that setup was horror and an immediate "We have to end that" and "That's far too expensive" even though as a % of well qualified engineer salary it was pretty low and waaaaay down the list of company expenses. Feeling quite pleased with myself this morning. :)