Column Reviews

I was at Column for 11 months and have waited to submit this review until there was some distance between myself and my experience of the company. I have no “axe to grind.” This was my first early-stage startup experience and what follows are my observations from time there. Leadership is young. Perhaps too young for the positions they hold for they haven’t had the experience of working in other organizations, under other leaders to learn what’s good and bad from a leadership perspective. All they have to go on is what they can read about in published content about “best practice” this and that. Their lack of experience was felt. But at the same they hired a lot of people just out of college or on their second job as a career professional. People with limited leadership experience hiring people with limited work experience nearly guarantees an absence of insightful feedback on leadership performance. No one has enough contrasting work experiences in order to form an opinion. There was a weekly company-wide meeting where everyone was to offer up a “win” for the week and share their screen of something they were working on. With a 50 person company, this felt juvenile and like a holdover from when the company was smaller. A few of us referred to it as “show and tell” from elementary school. It was a big waste of time even though the spirit of the exercise was to foster transparency. There was unspoken pressure to gather constant feedback on your performance through peer relationships. Everyone was encouraged to give shoutouts of public praise to colleagues via Slack. These feedbacks and praise mentions would then be used in your quarterly performance review as evidence that you were either doing your job well or (if you lacked enough praise comments or submitted feedback) that you weren’t doing it at all. It felt like a weaponized feedback/praise process. Quarterly performance reviews took an average of 3 weeks to complete. Days had to be set aside to assess yourself in detail as well as your manager. It cut into productivity. For a company this small it was too frequent. There was also a disconnect between the culture espoused in how they market themselves for talent and what it’s like being on the inside. Of course this perspective varies by team and leadership of that team. There was a very active rumor mill and for a company that’s 100% remote this becomes amplified. You don’t know who to trust. A lot of random disappearances of employees with vague explanations by leadership as to why they were no longer there. I was hired with the understanding Column was moving in the direction of marketing-led growth. 4 months into my time there it pivoted to sales led growth model. Marketing was being set up to be an extension of sales (lead gen is nothing more than sales through marketing channels) and the fundamentals of marketing were ignored. I was told that customer research didn’t add value and I needed to focus on generating leads for sales. This was just the tip of the iceberg. Overall, the company was not a good fit for me. As a person who had 20 years of career experience in multiple functions, I felt like my perspective and advice was often ignored in favor of theoretical assumptions they wanted to prove or disprove. This is typical of companies founded and run by engineers. Engineer-led growth is rooted in testing assumptions and quick pivots. It’s the opposite of customer-led growth. In fact, the product itself was built for middle market customers and attempts to scale up market were illuminating the deficiencies in not only the product, but the business model. From my vantage point it did not appear to be a customer-centric business. There was this underlying opinion that we would prevail regardless of what customers and non-customers were saying. We were “right” and our market would see the obvious need for our product if we just strong-armed them into realizing they had a problem that only we could fix.

The management team is young and way in over their heads. They’re CEO in particular is very impulsive and has pissed off a lot of people in the newspaper industry through easily avoidable mistakes. Their client base is about ~5,000 newspapers in the US, and they’ve burned bridges with a significant number of owners. High turnover in employees Very low likelihood the company will survive another 5 years. They have a habit of parting on bad terms with their employees