Dying a slow death - Anonymous employee Tradeshift Employee Review

1.0
20 Mar 2018
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

There was an amazing opportunity to make something great here. There are no "pros" left. Oh...and anyone who thinks that Tradeshift will ever go IPO is very deluded.

Cons

It's very hard to know where to start. From my personal experience, this is the worst place that I have ever worked. Are people nice? Sure. Do you have a decent work environment? Yes, absolutely. But Tradeshift is a study in dysfunction. Senior leadership is comprised of people that have no idea of what they are doing, but at the same time have themselves convinced that they know EXACTLY what they are doing. It's almost like you are living in a farce. Here's an example: the company ran out of money late in 2017. When they missed European payroll because of being broke, they claimed it was a "bank transfer" issue. Nobody believed that. And the CEO never acknowledged it (typical...just ignore major problems and move along). But flush with a new infusion of venture (sucker) capital shortly after that....they continued with their spending spree...with the crown jewel of wasted money being on their appearance at Davos (World Economic Forum). No money to pay employees, but there is literally *millions* of dollars to blow on "brand building" at Davos. This is the epitome of stupid people getting a few dollars and thinking they know how to act like smart people. The entire Davos debacle is nothing but a way to continually feed the voracious ego of the CEO. But don't you dare criticize it. It's sacred. Again, this is how stupid people run a company and *think* that they are smart. What's the marketing budget? Astronomical. What's the return on that? Microscopic. Smart investors would drill down on these things. Tradeshift literally preys on naive investors that don't know the right questions to ask. The company is stagnant. Little to no product development takes place (different excuse every quarter....acquisition, re-org, holidays, etc...). I'm pretty sure the sales numbers are embellished (honestly...I need to see the receipts...because the numbers change all the time - what was booked? what's promised? in what quarter/year? what was the sales budget? I mean...it's all murky and kinda shady). The sales-pitch to investors show slow growth now, but a massive uptick with "marketplace revenue" in the next few years. Like a hockey stick. It's laughable. Senior Management are made up of "yes" men/women that have been elevated light years beyond their capabilities because they constantly validate the CEO. Look at the LinkedIn profiles of every person in Senior Management. Every person is over their head in a tremendous fashion. And their failures are starting to show. The CEO is a CEO in name only. He is one more board meeting away from melting in desperation. Once Tradeshift shuts the doors, the invites to speaking engagements around the world will dry up. Guess you'll have to get a real job then. Although I left recently, I talk frequently with people who are still there (planning their escape). Things are poor and not improving. Products still stink. The "pivot" is crippling the company. The next round of funding is in serious jeapordy. People are leaving. This place is almost a corpse and will start to rot shortly. Save yourself.

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Tradeshift Response
8y
Wow, I’m sorry you feel this hurt about your time at Tradeshift. This seems like a very personal review for you. I wish you would have shared those feelings while still here and we could probably have addressed some of the misunderstandings, but allow me to try anyways here, not so much for you, but for all the potential employees looking at this review and all the hardworking Tradeshifters who wonder what this is about: You forget to mention that the reason you “know” all this, is that we have transparent leadership meetings once a week where all challenges and opportunities are discussed openly, available for the whole company to attend, no hiding because we believe in transparency. It’s hard to build a startup, and we never try to cover that. Product Development: We pushed out 2,000+ releases last year, via our continuous deployment pipeline. Are there areas or offices where we wished we could have done better, yes for sure, but the reality is we are set up to deliver and deliver fast which we do continuously. But I won’t lie, it’s difficult to build a global scalable B2B platform when you are facing exponential growth https://twitter.com/christianlanng/status/976259749699137536 if you consider that a cool challenge please take a look at our many job postings and come work with our amazing colleagues (if in doubt read some more reviews on this page). You seem to know very little about how our actual revenues work but is still very upset about it for some reason. We did 5x revenue growth (using GAAP accounting for those in doubt about the “murky nature”) from 2016 to 2017, that's why our investors chose to invest (and existing investors decided to follow-on). We just closed one of the largest fundraising rounds in the industry, with very sophisticated investors, your idea of the last sucker is somewhat wrong. As for future revenue streams (where you clearly are breaking the NDA you signed when joined), it’s not something we comment on, but we feel very good about it. We invest in events to sell the company and build our brand just like any other B2B SaaS company, but comparatively to listed peers or growth companies in our space I can tell you that our R&D cost is roughly 2x and our marketing cost is roughly 25% because we believe in winning through product innovation and leadership. Yes, one of the events we invest in is the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, we do so together with companies like Salesforce, Palantir, SAP, Workday, and Google, so there must surely be something all of these companies, not just us have missed when it comes to enterprise marketing ;) Then you take a swing at my leadership team, do you mean David who used to be CMO over at SAP Cloud? Or Thijs who worked on cloud products at Apple? (no he still can’t talk about it) or Sarika or Rinus who combined have more than 40 years of experience in this space? Nevermind that it’s a global, seasoned team, but even more importantly, they are my team and I trust them. You say it’s about loyalty, and you are damn right it's about loyalty, they have shown again and again that they work hard and don’t quit when things get tough. That they share our vision as founders for what Tradeshift can become. The reality is you didn’t make it at Tradeshift and for some reason chose to leave or were let-go. I’m sorry it hurt you like that and that you felt you had to do this write-up. To everyone else I say, come have a talk with us, ask about this review, hell ask about everything, you should do your due diligence and you will find we have a great team and one of the biggest opportunities in this space. /Christian Lanng, CEO My email if you want to ask me directly about this or hear more about awesome jobs we have: christian.lanng (...at..) tradeshift.com

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1.0
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Pros

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Cons

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