First time founders, go in with eyes open - Anonymous employee Gremlin Employee Review

2.0
7 Sept 2018
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

+ Both the SF and SJ offices are nice, well lit, and reasonably stocked with snacks. + They fly in remote people regularly for face time, which is great for morale and commmunication. +Great credibility with founders who built this at Netflix and Amazon first. +Incredible early customer list and traction/sales momentum, so your equity is likely to be valuable (if they don't try to take it back). + Friendly coworkers with people that want to help customers succeed. + Office manager is treated with great respect and gratitude. + CEO has kids, so work-life balance is good for a startup; expect to work hard 8-10 hours a day and have your weekends/evenings mostly to yourself.

Cons

- First time founders with careers at big companies building internal tools means they don't know a lot of things people with careers in startups think of as common knowledge. - Depending on your role, they may not understand your day to day, nor drivers of success. - Founders have issues in scaling the organization like waiting too long to hire an engineering manager/director, overextended success team, surprise attempts to claw back employee equity, lack of a defined recruiting and sourcing pipeline, not understanding how many projects are too many for a PM, and an over-reliance on Slack interrupting engineers too often, etc. - There was a regular rotation of putting people “in the dog house” across all departments, which typically related to a lack of understanding of that role. - There was no talk about values as the company grew. - Company all hands were infrequent given size and remote nature (once a quarter-ish), with very little Q&A time. - If diversity is important to you, you may want to look elsewhere. Company is ~85% male overall and 100% male in sales and prod/eng teams. - Recruiting relied on random inbound and personal network referrals, which is likely the main reason for the imbalance.

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Gremlin Response
7y
Start-ups are a challenge for both founders and employees. We appreciate the Pros that you listed above, and we’re proud of how we’ve expanded on those values since your time with the company. Over the past year we’ve more than doubled our workforce, on-boarded many successful customers, brought in another top-tier investment partner, and bolstered our leadership team with industry veterans. Our employees report strong engagement and support for management and we remain very excited about our future. Not every employment opportunity ends up being the perfect fit, and while we disagree with many of the Cons that you listed we respect your perception. Some of the things you listed were valid at the time, but are no longer true. What we will say is that these first-time founders are advised by sophisticated advisors and experienced executive leadership. Departments are led by seasoned professionals who organize and prioritize projects. We hold biweekly All-Hands meetings with time dedicated for Q&A (spontaneous and presubmitted). We want to address the Diversity and Inclusion comments. This is something we expect will require sustained, focused attention of our leadership team. We are absolutely committed to building a diverse team, and building an environment where people from underrepresented groups want to keep their careers here for years to come. In practical terms, this means we’re committed to paying equitably, reviewing for bias in all promotion decisions, sustained and continual attention to bias in hiring, and fleshing out our leadership team with more diverse viewpoints. As a startup, we still have a lot of work to do on these fronts, but we’re already seeing good results. We expect that to improve over time as we demonstrate our commitment to inclusive, supportive teams. Gremlin has been and will continue to be a great place for ambitious professionals to contribute and lead. It’s difficult to get everything right for everyone all at once, but our team is striving to build something great and improve upon our successes. We wish you the best as you continue your career.

Explore other reviews about Gremlin

5.0
24 Sept 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

I really enjoyed my time at Gremlin and left voluntarily for an opportunity I felt like I could not pass up. The people at Gremlin are tremendous, and customers see the value in what Gremlin delivers. Gremlin has an incredible set of existing customers and is unanimously considered the market leader. The GTM team has an incredibly strong leader and Engineering & Sales is a cohesive unit. The product has continued to evolve from Chaos Engineering into Reliability Management and now into Reliability Intelligence which will be relevant in the AI era. The Solution Architecture team is very strong and is a great asset to the sales team as well.

Cons

It can be a long sales cycle for net new logos in the Fortune 500. However this is typical for any startup breaking into new accounts.

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Gremlin Response
9mo
Thank you for the thoughtful review. We are so glad you enjoyed your time here!
1.0
8 Apr 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Decent sales engineering team and some engineers. Most account executives are engaged with their customers.

Cons

-CTO has very little social awareness and this becomes apparent when attempting to build long term positive relationships with customers as well as internally to colleagues -Extremely high turnover, entire HR team has quit -Licensing is a extremely difficult in the most beneficial environments -There is zero diversity in leadership and very apparent.

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