A review of too many startups: Little boys playing tanks in the sand

The environmental initiatives are wonderful and they've got a surprising amount of market traction.

Cons

Grove is a place where meritocracy-espousing libertarian men get together to talk about diversity and inclusion in between the more pressing conversations that dominate their Marin-dwelling lives concerning craft whiskey and Teslas. They all agree that diversity and inclusion are good things to invest in, but they don't actually want to promote anyone that doesn't look or sound just like them so they tend to focus their virtue-signaling efforts on volunteering their time outside the company and sending everyone emails about how woke they are because they say “Latinx” or something. Of course they’ve hired the obligatory token PoC HR muppet to sit there and shut down every uncomfortable Slido question that comes in on their behalf—rest assured, this person is nobody’s ally.

Even if you accept a role that you find interesting and report to a person you respect, that will all change very quickly when that person disappears to go do something else and you get traded to some other team. Your primary responsibility as an individual contributor at Grove will likely be to make sure that your manager fails up no matter how little management acumen they demonstrate or show an interest in acquiring. You should take pride in either training your department's "director" or flat-out doing his job for him (yes, it will be a man) because that's what being a team player is all about. Yeah, his CV says he's got 20 years of experience, but he's only been here a few months. He just needs to learn. Also his contract says we have to pay him for the full year if we fire him so... Remember, we have a "blameless culture." The valley’s a small place—you wouldn't want to say anything that might hurt your career, would you?

To make all of this worse, one of the investors who is (rightfully) tired of letting these entitled brats run around with his money recently decided that Grove needs to have an IPO immediately because IPOs are hot. The entire roadmap was thrown out the window to try and get the CTO’s disaster of a monolith ready for an auditor and every middle manager in every unnecessary fiefdom is convinced that they're some kind of diabolical chessmaster who's going to use the ensuing chaos as a smokescreen that will enable them to pull off a coup of the entire operation and crown themselves the holy king of soap subscriptions or something. It's toxic. Really, really toxic. I shudder to think how awful life must be for the folks in the fulfillment centers given what I've experienced as a well-compensated office drone with the privilege of saying "no" when somebody tells me to do something completely insane.

Advice to Management

Find something useful to do with the all-hands meetings. Marketing does not need a captive audience to congratulate themselves in front of every single week.