Pros
Decent starting salary to be honest
Cons
I joined Unreasonable as the second mentor coordinator in January 2022 to begin my career out of University. I left of my own accord in August of the same year with no opportunity on the other side. The Unreasonable Brand Unreasonable credits itself as the vanguard of a new era of finance - making change under the slogan, ‘Repurposing capitalism’. Capitalism is repurposed through a number of methods, with their primary product being ‘off-site programs’ where a cohort of CEO’s are invited to mingle with hand-picked mentors and investors - all sponsored by a partner company such as Barclays, the US State Department, Shell, Accenture, etc. If you find your way to their website and click on ‘what we believe’ you will see values listed which “drive everything we do”. I believe 4 have come to summarise my experience at the company: Magic in the Details, GYSHIDO, Empathy Builds Empires & We>I. Magic in the Details: “Design matters, the details matter, personality matters, and intentionality is critical.” Spending more time on logo design than the actual business model, it’s no surprise that Unreasonable is, in fact, the vanguard of a new era of finance - just not the one they purport to lead. More accurately read as repackaging capitalism, Unreasonable popularises an exploitative model. Where you would expect detail and clarity you find a void, and where detail is absolutely not necessary you find way too much. Considering their reliance on mentors there is embarrassingly little detail on what it means to be one, whilst there are reams and reams of notes on brand guidelines. Internally, employees are levelled incorrectly in relation to the work they do - especially women and POC. Progression is dependent on how well you look the part of a friend that the CEO, Daniel Epstein, wants to have instead of your attainment. It is no wonder that turnover is the order of the day, with close to 50% of the workforce choosing to leave the company since 2020. Finally, intentionality is used to justify poor decision making and inadequate management. After the CEO was called out about a post on his personal LinkedIn promoting a company policy in the wake of Roe v Wade that did not exist and hadn’t been discussed with the women in the company, he cooly responded that, whilst the policy didn’t exist, other CEO’s within the portfolio had taken up similar policies (with no mention of who these people were) and that the intention was good so it was justified. GYSHIDO “We look for a team-player mindset with an autonomous work practice. Unreasonable is not a micro-management culture.” Unreasonable looks for generous people who truly believe in the mission and have the skills to exact their vision. They take an overly hands-off approach to management to the point where you will define your own projects as you search for the limits of your decision making capacity - only to find certain initiatives OK’d whilst others will be taken from you as they threaten to challenge the status-quo. Regarding internal CRM, ‘diversity’ is codified as ‘strengthens global identity’ which, in turn, involves looking at a LinkedIn profile picture and checking a box defining whether the person is white or not. These metrics have been promoted publicly in the past. This is something that has been brought up time and time again to the senior leadership by all those I would call friends at the company as well as those who were there before my time - with each person offering alternative solutions and offering to get it done themselves. Yet it has fallen on deaf ears. Empathy builds empires “We seek out [people] who choose humility over arrogance, assume good intentions amongst one another, communicate honestly and with empathy…always treat one another with respect.” In lieu of many complaints about how toxic the work culture was before I left, SLT started a new initiative called the ‘Culture Renovation’. Teammates were asked how the organisation could improve - only to have their candid suggestions ignored and to subjected instead to weeks of lectures on how junior staff must sign on to the values of the company or take $1000 and leave - an initiative that was later scrapped. Furthermore, at the one off-site program I attended, serious concerns were brought to SLT about how inclusive the atmosphere of the program was and how it was causing genuine psychological distress. It was brought to the CEO, CSO and the Community-team manager that, in the space of only a few days, junior staff had seen instances of racism, sexism and emotional manipulation as well as concerning levels of indecision and blatant abuses of power. Aside from platitudes offered by the CEO, nothing was done and the program was lauded as a massive success. This was all the way until the partner company cancelled the contract and Unreasonable had to lay off its least ‘engaged’ staff with practically no warning or consideration. WE>I “We stand on a belief that the world’s greatest challenges will never be solved by one person, one team, or one company.” Fundamentally, I would not advise joining this company. Despite the elegant wording of this value, it stands in direct contradiction to the vision of the CEO which is that he can be the one man to do it all. At Unreasonable We ≥ I, dependent on who ‘I’ is and who ‘we’ are.
