An exciting "rocket ship" non traditional technology company with some growing pains but an amazing culture.
Pros
The company has grown rapidly beyond any time scale most employees thought would be realistic. But yet still, the breadth of the company is so large that – even at it's size now of ~110 people – you can still see every individual's work come out in the final product. After working at a couple different places now (both at startups and larger corporations), the culture of the place is amazing. It's not that small startup by any means, but it's still much closer to the startup side of the spectrum than the corporate side. I'd say that I know at least 90% of the people who work here, and everyone gets to interact with each other regularly (both for work and just casual talking) almost every day (they just added catered lunches too, taco tuesday, pizza fridays, and healthy salads on all other days). So to put it short, the people are definitely the best part of this company. But if the people are great, and the work is crap, it doesn't really matter. Thankfully, that is not the case. The tech everyone gets to work on is incredibly interesting and you can really see that "breadth" of the company as you walk around the space. There's a full fledged electrical engineering lab, there's dynos running in the garage all the time testing out the shocks, there's software engineers working on a plethora of different things, there's mechanical engineers designing things in CAD – and a machine shop that makes those parts, etc, etc. It's always so lively and there's never a shortage of work to be done (more on that). Seeing the technology in the prototype vehicles is what really takes it to the next level. It's quite a dramatic difference driving one a car with ClearMotion than one without (and seeing all the *crazy* things it can do with all the demos they have). It's pretty amazing how far the technology has come. Of course, there's still a lot more fine tuning work to be done before it's realistically "production ready", but so much progress has been done in the past year from all the teams that I think the entire team has a lot of confidence in getting this out there on real cars on real roads. The culture is great, everyone genuinely cares about their work (albeit at varying degrees), and the level of talent, especially among the engineers is really high (most from ivy leagues, lots of automotive experience, or just incredibly talented). There's no office politics at all, and people are pretty blunt with each other (it's something everyone gets used to working here). The benefits are great, and the yearly retreat is *far* beyond what any normal company would do – it's insane. It's a relatively flat structure (again, mainly because of the breadth of the company), so no matter who you really are, there's only really 1 to 2 people "above" you before you hit one of the co-founders. The managers respect everyone and by no means manage in a "hierarchical" fashion, and really act more like leading team members – which is a breath of fresh air coming from previous companies. Unlimited vacation, as much as it is a BS term made in silicon valley, is surprisingly not bad here. Everyone actually takes a fair amount of vacation, and no one is thought less because of it. In fact, managers even try to convince people to take vacation if they feel like they're not making use of the policy! It's pretty great. The co-founders are great too and instill a medium-high amount of confidence in the company becoming properly successful in the future. HR actually takes everyone's concerns seriously, and the specific examples of unwarranted conduct that I've personally heard about (that were expressed) had pretty immediate actions taken to resolve them. Upper management could be improved with more actionable requests and decisions vs. slightly vague expectations and timelines, but – so far – that has not become a debilitating issue, though I can see it hurting us more and more as the company grows. Otherwise, from the top-down, I do really think the company is in pretty good hands. Lastly, for the "rocket ship" aspect of it, the company has grown over 4X in the past couple years in valuation and just raised a monster $100M Series C from some seriously high grade investors and partners. After experiencing the product, I think everyone will understand why. On top of that, the transparency within the company for why decisions were taken (i.e why someone was let go), or how they're planning to tackle a situation (like moving offices), or even for just general curiosity has been next level. I have literally never seen any company in my lifetime with as much "good" transparency as ClearMotion. "Trust" is one of the values preached, and surprisingly it is very much valued throughout the entire company, top to bottom. So overall, I *love* working here. Unfortunately, I can't explain everything due to NDAs, but the experiences you get working at this company are next to none. Because suspension is an integral part in every car, you get to collaborate with the best car companies in the world, and some of the experiences you get while doing that, are unbeatable!! The culture is great, and although the place is becoming ever so slowly less personal as so many people join, I think everyone's done a pretty amazing job at keeping the overall attitude within the company the same. I would absolutely recommend, without even thinking twice, for anyone talented to come join the company. Compared to every other company I've worked for (from startups to corporations), this is a *diamond* in the rough and is only getting better.
Cons
However, everything definitely is not sunshine and rainbows. For starters, the process within the company needs to be improved – from ideation to execution to validation. There have been large steps taken recently to make it much more formalized, but just because it's formal and written on paper – doesn't mean it's going to be followed. I think there needs to be more instillation on why process is important (in more casual terms), and people genuinely need to follow it (which is always attempted until there's one "fire drill" and everything falls apart). These didn't use to be big problems when the team was small, but as the team is growing so fast we can't afford to make mistakes to save some time + just to make one customer happy. Next, there needs to be huge, concrete actions taken to improve the gender diversity. Believe it or not, there are lots of women engineers out there, and yet the gender ratio at the company is *really* bad, especially when it comes to the engineering department. From the co-founders down, everyone is aware of this – but no real actions have taken place, and I'm afraid that if this continues, this is only going to become worse – and eventually will become a talking point about the company. Hiring goes as normal, and everyone is just magically expecting that by going to a couple society of women engineers conferences, that this problem will be magically solved – it's not. Upper management has to take some serious action on this. However outside of gender alone, I would say the company is quite diverse. There's so many people coming from all different parts of the world (and the united states!), and it's a really interesting blend of cultures – so at least there's that! The workload is intense, and that comes along with being a startup and trying to get ClearMotion out there in a cut throat automotive world, but there needs to be a better division of work. Time and time again, I see one or two people being dumped with more work than they can handle that could be solved if it were just distributed more evenly. And the people who are clearly doing more work need to be compensated and praised more, and that needs to be ingrained into the culture. Especially as this affects the work/life balance for a select few. The company is growing really fast, but at the same time, many people are hired simply too early and are left either a) acting as if they're doing work when they're not doing really anything of value or b) trying to fix things that are not broken just to prove they're bringing some value. We need to stop doing this and clearly take a look at who is absolutely crucial to being on board *right now*. Hiring more people does not solve all our problems in dealing with more customers/people. Process is. Lastly, as the company grows, the co-founders really need to focus on pushing the culture more – through actions put in place – not just words said at all hands. They've done a pretty amazing job so far, but it's clearly starting to fade as so many new people join the company. You can slowly see the personable-ness start to fade, as everyone realizes that they might not know everyone's name/what they do for the first time.
