Toxic - avoid - Anonymous employee WONE Employee Review

• Polished exterior and strong branding give the impression of a cutting-edge AI health-tech startup operating at the frontier. Good for leveraging in interviews..! • The mission is noble and the PR narrative is compelling; on the surface, it’s easy to feel like you’re joining something meaningful. May explain all the rewards and accolades.. • Quarterly off-sites “retreat” days were genuinely enjoyable and offer a rare chance to actually connect with the team in a relaxed environment

• The company is painfully slow on the priorities that actually matter. Sales, execution, and operational focus are consistently deprioritised while energy is spent chasing distractions like meticulous planning. • Leadership is deeply disconnected from reality. Aside from the Chief Scientific Officer — the only truly competent senior figure — decisions are often intellectual and feel divorced from actually making a quality product people want to use. • One senior manager in particular (not CEO) consistently generated a toxic working environment. Planning was erratic, and communication arrived in frantic, vague bursts that pushed all execution risk onto employees with zero guidance. Feedback undermined rather than supported, sign-offs carried baked-in scepticism that pre-assigned blame, and “ownership” was demanded without any of the resources, context, or clarity required to deliver. Micromanagement appeared at the wrong level while actual strategy was nowhere to be found. The result was a culture defined by tension, confusion, and the constant sense that the rules could change at any moment. Psychological safety was effectively nonexistent. • People are routinely misled about what they’re walking into and often set up to fail by shifting expectations, unstable scopes, and leadership volatility. • Communication is inconsistent and unclear, and performance narratives often feel warped or disconnected from the real work being done. There is no stable definition of success. • The atmosphere is tense and employees don’t feel safe speaking honestly or pushing back, and many simply disengage to protect themselves. • There is no meaningful culture — the office is silent, everyone arrives at 9 and leaves at 6 (on the dot), and there’s no cohesion or real sense of team. • Burnout is common due to constant context switching, unclear priorities, and the emotional load of working under reactive leadership. • The product itself has no real product–market fit, and strategic priorities thrash wildly instead of addressing core issues. Leadership avoids accountability and does not make honest assessments of traction or performance. • The app is barely used internally — and for good reason. It’s clunky, underdeveloped, and far from what’s promised. Candidates are misled during interviews about user numbers and growth, and the truth only becomes clear after joining. It leaves you feeling deceived.

At its core, the product space is really interesting. There's a lot of potential and opportunity to do great work. Nice office location and work environment. Plenty of booths, meeting rooms and breakout spaces to get some variety during the day. Really friendly co-workers and team, it feels like a tight-knit group and everyone is playing a part. It's quite a diverse team too so there's no ego's. A leadership team that listens to feedback and care about the team. If you ask for help/give feedback they do listen. A good mix of staff here from the beginning and newer team members. Decent work remote policy to use across the year, including a company retreat.

Hiring the right candidates/positions seems to be a challenge (although this is pretty common in tech as a whole right now). Benefits could be better (eg. not having private health insurance), but I would expect this to change the more the company grows. Finding product market fit isn't easy, nor for everyone. Processes can be a bit stressful at times, but speaking up during those moments and asking for help goes a long way.