Culture X Strategy for Breakfast - Avis employé Customer Success Manager PredictSpring

The primary reason to join or stay at a company is the people. I genuinely enjoy working with everyone at PredictSpring: they're a competent, caring, and friendly group that is committed to doing the right thing. A secondary consideration in joining a startup is the vision. I joined as a repeat founder, and so I have some perspective on this. Investors will tell you that the key to a business's success is vision, and the determining factor there is whether leadership knows their customers better than anyone else. I believe that they do here at PredictSpring. The laser-focus on customer enablement and satisfaction is incredibly gratifying to see, and I think it will take us far. Perks are not my primary concern here, but PredictSpring is very generous with them.

It's a small startup. There are growing pains. We're paying down some technical debt while trying to improve velocity and grow our market-share. The upside here is that the organization is genuinely interested and committed to doing this. I'd also like more collaboration and integration with the organization as a whole (possibly some global chat channels)

A lot of the individuals are great.

After I interviewed, I Googled PredictSpring and found a single review: "Worst people ever." That sort of concerned me, but I suspected it was mistaken--the interviewers seemed really friendly and they raved about how great the product was. The fact of the matter is that the organization was a train-wreck. The product quality was horrible and outages were constant. They basically only wanted to hire contingent (generally H1-B) candidates so that they could force them to work constantly. They would promise 99.99% uptime and even though the real uptime was a small fraction of that they would constantly lie about it. I'd worked in dysfunctional organizations before, and I never attributed to malice what I could contribute to incompetence, but at PredictSpring it didn't matter! The character of the organization was "malicious incompetence."