WORST DECISION I EVER MADE. PLEASE RUN! - Customer Success - Director Bakkt Employee Review

If you are considering leaving your current job for a position at Bakkt, BEWARE. You will regret your decision. Bakkt has gone downhill at a rapid pace. 1. The number of departures at varying levels of the organization should be a BIG RED FLAG that this place is terrible. Several C-level departures, dozens of Managers, Directors, Department VPs, and dozens of individual contributors. I have never seen anything like it. For months, the executive team told everyone that “attrition is normal when a company goes public” and “it is business, people come and go. It is natural”. They said those things for as long as they could before the departures continued to get worse, and then they stopped addressing it in the all hands meetings 2. The executive team is clueless. All of the executives are friends or former colleagues of the CEO. They were put into their positions and are not qualified to run an organization as evidenced by the poor decision making 3. The executive team is dishonest on multiple fronts a. They blatantly lie to clients about EVERYTHING. On a call with a client, the executives tell their clients that they are invested in their business, they are their top priority. On internal calls, the CEO said in an all hands meeting that he wants to get clients he actually wants, not the clients he inherited from previous leadership. He and the rest of the executives also regularly tell the team that we need to control the client and show them who is in control here, even though performance with the clients has been terrible for months consecutively b. The number of departures has gotten so bad that they now try to hide it from clients. The executive team released direction to say that we are no longer allowed to communicate any attrition to clients, because clients are getting concerned. When people in heavy client interaction roles resign, they try to have them NOT say anything to clients before their departure, so that the executive team can make up reasons about why the employee left. It has happened multiple times 4. For the first year and a half of Bakkt coming in, all they shouted about was the app, the app, the app. After lying to the company for over a year about the performance of the app, they finally changed their tune 5. They are bringing in waves of new leaders to replace everyone who has left. They are telling all of the incoming leaders that the previous executive team were a bunch of idiots and that’s why the business is failing. But the business started to fail when the CEO and his friends took over and started making decisions 6. To try to save employees (because everyone was/is leaving) they offered a BS retention bonus to select employees, but you had to stay for two years to get it and if you left anytime before then, you would have to pay the first installment back, but you wouldn’t even get the first installment until one year in. They tried to swing this as a recognition bonus for everyone’s hard work. LOL. 7. No one in the company got a performance evaluation. Instead, we all got a flat 10% raise – again, another tactic to retain people. This is great when you consider the average annual raise is less than 10%, but it sucks when you know that everyone in the company got the same increase including people who hardly work versus those who work 12 hour days. It shows that everyone is valued the same. The communication was also poor as it was released in a companywide email, not communicated by managers 8. We are constantly being asked to lie to or manipulate clients to hide how bad things are internally 9. The HR team collects feedback from key people who leave, but they do nothing with it. The HR leaders acknowledge how bad it is, but they don’t take action. It is almost as if the HR leaders are scared to go against the CEO 10. They talk so badly about really good people who have left the company. Instead of recognizing that they have really big problems and fixing them, they spend their time bashing the very people they tried to beg to stay. Once someone denies their request to stay, they become enemy #1 and their name is run through the mud. This has happened with several people and as recent as TODAY, they are still doing it 11. The all hands meetings are a JOKE. When anyone asks difficult questions about the mass departures or the leveling exercise or pay increases, the question is met with attitude and a fluff answer is given Joining Bakkt was the worst mistake I ever made. I hope I can stop you from doing the same.