* Very inexperienced and ineffective co-founders. CEO once introduced a list of _28_ principles, during an all-hands, that he expected everyone to memorize and was going to have the chief-of-staff print them off for everyone. CTO lives in his own world, where he maintains a secretive research clique within the AI team, and does not care about the engineering division; he is easily bamboozled by the dishonest product engineering management team.
* Both the sales organization and engineering management are very passive-aggressive and slippery. Not good team players. Will ignore people indefinitely, but make tons of noise when they want something from someone else.
* Sales organization promises delivery to customers without engineering or product team input or consent and then screams about urgency and priorities at all-hands meetings. Some of them even come into engineering Slack channels to yell at engineers.
* Level inflation: as a NYC=based startup, this company is unable to compete with Silicon Valley or better known startups for good talent in terms of money or prestige. They grossly over-inflate engineering levels in an attempt to draw people in. As a result, they end up hiring principal engineers and managers who act too big for their shoes. Cocky, overconfident, but barely competent. By contrast, some of the most solid people are foreign-based senior engineers who have been with the company for several years and have few other employment options in the US.
* CTO does not keep his word to other people and also has a tendency to use people (both other companies and individuals). He is also very distrusting of people outside of his AI research clique and only doles out access/information on a very tight basis, in spite of how it impedes others from doing their jobs and in spite of the dysfunctional silos that it creates.
