Great vision, Great Challenges - Anonymous employee Cinchy Employee Review

Thank you for taking the time to submit this. This was well thought out and comes across as genuine and constructive. You raise some genuinely great points! 1) Re: Mandatory Recording We never have, nor ever will have, a policy "mandating" recording of meetings. Calls are explicitly disclaimed with the ability to opt out, and customers will indeed occasionally ask that calls not be recorded. All employees can start/stop a recording at any time, meetings marked as 'private' are not recorded by default, and employees can change their default recording settings. This is true for all calls, be them internal or external. The fact that you raised this here tells me that you believed/believe otherwise, and as such I will immediately share this with all staff in the event that others share this view. PS. If anyone reading this ever finds themselves working at a company with such a mandate, get out of there! 2) Re: Nebulous Business Strategy I very much agree with the issues you raised. We’ve seen challenges, especially with customers who purchased Cinchy for a single project (vs. those where it was sold as a multi/cross-project capability). We've been very transparent about this, and over the past few months, we have been very focused on creating pre-selected "packages" that target more narrow ICPs with more specific business outcomes, ensuring any future purchase supports a recurring need (vs. single point-in-time outcome). This is very much in progress, so it will be some time before anyone claims “mission accomplished”. 3) Re: In-Person Gatherings I also agree that we need to increase in-person gatherings. This is somewhat challenging given the fact the team is distributed, but regardless, it's become crystal clear, especially over the past six months, that the cost of travel is lesser than the cost of misalignment. 4) Re: Engineering Understaffed Mostly agree here, and while we have doubled the size of the dev team post our last round, it is unlikely we will ever have “enough” builders (given the size/scale of the vision). I think the real issue here isn’t capacity, rather it is the diversity of customer usage that creates the feeling that we are doing “everything for everyone”. We believe the answer lies in our strategy to refine our ICPs and establish pre-selected packages/patterns to reduce the variability in how the platform is used, ultimately improving sales, reducing churn, and solve for the feeling of engineering being chronically understaffed. 5) Re: Dogfooding I agree with you on this being a point of contention but I do believe there is also confusion at play. If you check our “Applications” table in Cinchy, you’ll see we have 260+ “tools” we use across the company. This includes shared tools like Loom, Zoom, Gong, Freshdesk, Hubspot, Zoom Info, Google Workspace, but also team-specific and occasionally even person-specific tools. Some may argue this is too many for a 60-person company, but I don’t. Our vision is that you should be able to use any “tool,” with the 1 caveat that any business-critical data behind the tool is “liberated” using Cinchy to prevent information siloing and a loss of control over our organizations' data. Somehow, this has been confused to be a constraint on using tools, which I will clarify for the wider team. With all this said, the internal use of our product to solve for data collaboration is non-negotiable, and I do try to make that clear to anyone in the interview process. 6) Re: CEO is an arse On this point, I also agree. The CEO preaches that sharing one's opinion openly and honestly is a “must-have” in the modern age, especially to counter the increased trend toward “fake news.” However, he does not appreciate the consequences of “telling it as he sees it” to the broader organization. Firstly, he is not always right, and sharing one's opinion if you are occasionally wrong can result in misinformation and confusion, even if not the intent. Secondly, imagine being accountable for something only to have the CEO call out errors/omissions/improvements without regard to who is listening. For eons, organizations have known that only positive feedback should be shared in public and constructive/negative feedback should be shared behind closed doors. This is Management 101. The CEO has been told this before but is stubborn and won’t listen. BTW, I am the CEO.