Pros
You get to work on a genuinely innovative and cool product. Both founders are thoughtful and kind. Junior staff members are like a family. The company is fairly young and had a lot of fun activities (pre covid).
Cons
Several things about the Zola culture stand out to me as problematic. The downside of the very close friendships that have formed among junior staff is that it can be taken advantage of by leadership. People are underpaid and have to threaten to leave to get a promotion because there is no career development or systematic advancement outside of the engineering team. Leadership takes advantage of these friendships to keep people around without compensation. The leadership team also talks a lot about a “flat org structure”. This is nonsense. If you aren’t on the executive team, your opinions don’t matter. They lump everyone below the leadership team level together so they can be treated the same and ignored the same. Mid level managers are completely unempowered. Case in point was reviews, where managers had no say in career advancement for the associates that reported to them. Last and most frustrating is the make up of the leadership team on a couple of levels. It’s stacked with a bunch of people who worked together at Gilt, and that bond seems to trump anything else. There are some terrible leaders at Zola, but complaints are ignored because they go back to the Gilt days. There is not a single Black leader outside of customer support. There is no care paid to diversity at all. This is what allows the president and coo to get away with calling someone a “slave driver” at an all company event. It was outrageous.