Pros
- Good place to start your career as you'll be exposed to a lot (due to the small size of the company with a lot of work to do) - Good work/life balance - Remote work because they got rid of offices to save costs - Compensation is actually pretty good once you have worked there a while (they throw cash at you to stop you leaving) - Benefits are standard (the minimum expected from a tech company)
Cons
- Simply put, it's a company that has always scraped by. - It had the potential to be something great but poor leadership and decision making at various stages of the company significantly hindered growth. From all perspectives, Sales, Product, Marketing, Engineering. - The company failed a lot of smart, talented individuals whose career growth was stunted by a lack of direction, support and development. - Wild/laughable and out-of-touch-with-reality expectations & targets from the Board. Coupled with CEOs who lacked the ability to manage up to the board meant that targets were missed frequently and often non-salespeople missed out on bonuses/comp for years. Comp structure is a whole other mess (complicated and drives incorrect behaviors). - Competitors raised more, were ahead in product development/strategy and the gap to catch up grew larger and larger. Lumar's platform move should have happened a long time ago. A lot of blame was laid on legacy tech that slowed innovation. Sales have done what they can but the product is grossly behind the times - Competitors also have stronger partnership plays and acquisitions were made in the market (right under leaderships' noses) that have left Lumar with few places to go for an exit event. - Not only that, but Lumar lost their only major partner (Conductor) who acquired a competitor (ContentKing) while still "in partnership" with Lumar. To save face, leadership claimed to have known about the acquisition ahead of time, said everything would be fine. Turns out, things were not fine and the churn/loss in ARR had a significant impact (shock). - Meanwhile, other big players in the space (BrightEdge) were also acquiring other direct competitors (OnCrawl). A very embarrassing period for the company. And hence the lack of viable exit options. Likely now, the best option is a PE firm that will strip it for parts and remove driftwood. - Sales had a lot of changes (structure, compensation, process) with a toxic culture brought in with new leadership. A passive aggressive style made for a very uncomfortable environment. It quickly stopped being fun to work at Lumar. - While we’re on the topic of communication styles there was a distinct difference between the way the CEO communicated with men vs women. With males it was always, casual (yo man, what’s up, how’s it going? etc.) but with women the tone & language was very formal and over-professional. - The CEO, after a year in seat, said that he needed to ‘focus more on the product because he didn’t know what it did’. - There was a lot of spin from leadership on a variety of topics. Anyone with half a brain saw through it. - Certain teams were told by leadership that they'd run out of money to pay wages (June 2022) and that was the last month, which is why they quietly raised a bridge loan instead of publicly doing a down round Series C. Not sure how they're going to raise anything in this market. - Chief People Officer was an anti-vaxxer - Hard to attract top talent because of the niche market of Technical SEO. SEOs do not get significant budget. As a result, the value of their "Enterprise" deals are really mid-market/commercial deals at other tech companies. In fairness, attempts were made to expand to high-level decision makers like CMOs but they typically don't care about technical SEO.
