Pros
I'll start this review by stating I'm a full-time employee with Grabr at their NY office. Looking at many of the reviews, it looks like many of the reviews are from users of the platform, rather than employees. This review is to give the experience of a full-time office employee at Grabr. 1. You will learn a lot Building a marketplace (where you have two sets of customers: supply-side and demand-side) is already known to be one of the hardest businesses to successfully start. As Grabr is very international for such a small company, you are adding to the marketplace experience a number of factors: multiple languages, global markets with varying product demands, different financial and tax systems from all over the world, very specific geographical customer matching from thousands of cities around the world and much more. And that's just the core business. Grabr is revolutionizing more than just the travel industry with a number of products outside of its core marketplace. I'm proud of how much I've learned from my time at Grabr. The fast-paced nature of the business and strong support from the leadership team really allows team members to learn and grow very quickly and efficiently. Some of our past interns started at Grabr with zero experience in the team they interned with as part of a learning experience. Two months later, they were able to join some of the largest companies in the industry, without having had prior experience to their internship. I've really never experienced a company that can teach so much, so effectively. 2. The people If the company culture and your teammates at a company are not good, it doesn’t matter what other pros there are at the company. It’s not a company one should work at. I’m proud to say that Grabr has a great team. Never before have I worked with such a close team. It's unique that Grabr is a relatively small company and so spread out (we have a number of offices around the world), yet somehow so connected. A lot of communication between offices is done via web conference, but we've had plenty of opportunities to travel to different offices and meet the worldwide team. The team is very open and we encourage discussion and transparency. It’s very easy to bring up any concerns with your teammates, your manager, the cofounders or even in front of the entire company during an all-hands meeting. The leadership team truly cares about their employees and it really feels like Grabr puts its employees as its number one priority. 3. Work/Life balance We work hard to fulfill our mission, but we also have a very good work/life balance. I've been in the startup world for years and Grabr has had the best work/life balance. Part of it is achieved by the fact that we have a very strong team that has allowed efficient processes to be developed over the years. We get more done in fewer hours than most startups with unstructured processes. Part of it is achieved due to the respect that the company has for its employees.
Cons
As with all companies, there will always be cons and complaints. Luckily the pros at Grabr heavily outweigh the cons. 1. Some disconnect at times due to how spread out we are around the world I'm actually amazed about how well we function with so many offices. It could actually be a pro as we tend to cut out unnecessary conversation and make sure that everything is communicated well the first time around, ensuring that meetings are effective and concise. Yet, being so spread out in multiple timezones, sometimes it could take a bit longer to get some clarification. You also miss out on some of the human-factor of being in-person with all of your coworkers. 2. In the past we didn't have the strongest People Ops function This isn't an issue anymore, but when we were a younger company, we should have put more resources into people ops. The lack of it, caused us to make a some very poor hiring choices in the past. The generosity of the entire company led us to be taken advantage of by some bad actors who we hired. Essentially, hiring is actually one of the most difficult jobs at a company and we should have put more resources into it. By not doing so, it cost us a lot of wasted money and time with absolute nonsensical initiatives that hurt us. It's a good thing the current team reversed the damage done and past actions like this really allow us to learn from our mistakes.