The CEO
Everything at FINSYNC flows from one source: the CEO. He is, without question, the single greatest obstacle to the company's success, and he is constitutionally incapable of seeing it.
He inserts himself into every single aspect of the company, not to provide direction, but to take credit and then take over. If an idea worked, he originated it. If it failed, that was on you. He would routinely absorb someone else's concept, present it as his own vision, and then proceed to execute it so badly that the original idea was unrecognizable by the time it reached anyone outside the company. The person who actually came up with it would sit in the meeting and say nothing, because saying something meant losing their job.
And this is the thing people need to understand before they join: you cannot criticize this man. Not once, not gently, not constructively, not with pages of metrics and data. A single critical word, even delivered diplomatically, could end your job. He has fired people for it. More commonly, he would first go silent, seething with rage, and then sometimes blow up in the meeting. The effect was that an entire team of smart, experienced professionals spent years biting their tongues while he told us how badly we were missing the mark, knowing that the one thing we could never say was the most obvious thing in the room.
The project chaos was its own special form of torture. He would arrive for the day with a grand vision, declare it the most important thing the company had ever done, assign the team to execute it, and then by the following day have scrapped it entirely in favor of something new, always worse, always presented with the same urgency. This happened on a loop. We watched helplessly as one initiative after another was launched, demolished, and replaced. Not because the market had shifted. Because he had changed his mind, and his mind changed constantly and without warning. It was a Sisyphean nightmare.
The "unlimited PTO" policy deserves its own paragraph because it is a lie. He complained openly when employees took time off. He tracked it. He penalized people who took more than a week, cutting hours or creating paper trails to justify termination. HR would proactively warn employees when they were perceived to have taken "too much" time off, despite the policy being unlimited on paper. He expected after-hours availability as a baseline, not an exception. Evenings, weekends, overlapping with personal time that was technically approved. The expectation was that if you truly cared about the company, you would simply always be working.
When he ran out of money and couldn't make payroll, he called it a "stress test." His words. Not a crisis: a test of loyalty. "We don't get paid unless we grow," he said, to people who had been working without pay for weeks. You cannot pay rent on loyalty. Some of us learned that the hard way.
His worst fear is that he is the problem. He will never admit it. He will read this review and feel certain it was written by someone who just didn't get it, who wasn't resilient enough, who failed to see his vision. He will blame the team. He always does. Zero accountability, infinite confidence, and a company that proves the combination is fatal.
HR: Decorative, Not Functional
HR at this company is not there for employees. Full stop. Every interaction is designed to protect the CEO and run out the clock until you either quit or stop asking questions.
When employees asked directly about whether payroll would be processed on time, the answer was a masterclass in saying nothing: "as far as I know, it should be fine," followed by "the focus needs to be on results, results, results." Not a timeline. Not a commitment. Just deflection designed to keep you working without any accountability on their end. When the CEO himself admitted in a meeting that employees would not get paid unless the company "grew," HR was in the room and said nothing. That is not a neutral position. That is complicity.
During this ongoing payroll crisis, new hires were deliberately kept in the dark. HR was aware. They were also actively recruiting and onboarding new people during this period, knowing those people would not be paid on schedule. That is not an oversight. That is predatory.
The handbook promises unlimited PTO. In practice, employees who took time off were penalized. HR handled none of it proactively.
Eventually, many employees stopped viewing HR as a resource altogether. It became clear that their role wasn't to protect employees from toxic leadership, but to protect toxic leadership from accountability. That realization was one of the most demoralizing parts of working there. You expect leaders to have blind spots. You don't expect the people responsible for addressing those blind spots to help preserve them. The CEO created the dysfunction, but HR helped normalize it. Together, they built a culture where speaking honestly carried risk, staying silent became a survival skill, and some of the company's most talented people eventually decided their only option was to leave.
