Toxic culture + Product unlikely to launch - Anonymous employee Upgrade Pack Employee Review

- Co-Founders / CEOs aren't open to feedback on resulting in everyone agreeing to all their ideas and strategy, regardless if they are good or poor. They also micromanage everything which results in bottlenecks with the CEO. For example, one of the CEOs writes marketing copy and designs wireframes resulting in the sales, marketing, product, and tech teams waiting for content. - despite being proud of offering staff "work from wherever days", because these days require CEO approval, they are almost impossible to use due to the CEOs almost always finding reasons to not approve them - as opposed to most pre-revenue startups, there is a policy for everything and numerous WIP meetings and a significant number of staff with some roles not typically hired until revenue has at least been achieved if not reaching significant levels - there is a lack of transparency, with the staff only finding out company updates during big grandiose announcements instead of as initiatives/changes are being considered or in progress - it's not technically possible to execute the main premise of the business, which is to have a third party, like Upgrade Pack, upgrade an airline ticket from economy to business and change their cabin class. This is why, after over two years, airlines haven't signed up and the product hasn't launched and likely won’t before the company runs out of funding (you’ll notice one or two other comments about waiting for launch). This review may look like an outlier but it's important to look at the dates of the previous reviews.The previous reviews are grouped into two sets since the CEO twice asked select people to write reviews. Because the CEOs manage through intimidation, it's no surprise that current employees would feel the need to comply and follow their instructions. Also, very few of the staff had worked at a startup before, hence don’t have the experience of seeing a proper start-up operation.