Spokeo Reviews

The last few months is where things totally fell apart. I realized that the founders (CEO and CTO) had already decided that they had zero confidence in my UX Director. The major reason I joined the company was to work with her because I KNEW she could build a solid UX strategy and follow through with it. So it was with great disappointment and confusion that things just didn't work out. - Nepotism, favoritism, family… It runs absolutely rampant at this company. I understand this is unavoidable because we like to hire those we trust and relationships sometimes blossom, but the internal familial relations to top management has created a whitelist/blacklist type of environment where you find people just brown-nosing to get into the good graces of the "family". Unfortunately this lends itself to fostering a toxic environment. - CEO: He's a nice guy and I don't have a problem with him personally, but he gets stuck on making well-thought-out and clear-minded decisions. I'm not saying it's an easy job at the top, but he might not actually be the right person to take on those responsibilities. For a company of this size and age, they really shouldn't be shooting from the hip on strategic planning (or lack of planning, thereof). - CTO: He's not a nice guy. Arrogant, backstabbing, and lacking of emotional intelligence. He once got upset when I tried to present ideas around conversion rates during the checkout process. I had multiple ideas and one of them happened to be an outside-the-box solution that he didn't care for. He asked me if I knew how the company worked in the middle of the meeting which just shows that he wasn't really about coming up with solutions. In addition, I've noticed a hint of his misogynistic behavior which really concerns me. This is a serious red flag that should be somehow addressed. The upper management consists of college roommates who have been running this company from the start, no doubt with plenty of blood, sweat, and tears throughout the years. They've lasted this long so there's got to be some method to their madness, right? But simply because you've been at the company the longest doesn't mean you've got the skills to lead.

Spokeo may look like a hip startup at first, but don't be fooled by the "perks" that they offer. There's a reason why Spokeo has more people in their "Culture team" than in some product teams. They have to try hard to make it appear as if the company actually cares for its employees by organizing events and having random treats for employees from time to time. Employees in all departments are leaving so fast they can barely fill up the vacant positions that are open and that's a big red flag. The company has no real direction in terms of what they want to do with their products. Prepare to spend years (if you can tolerate these people for that long) wasting time building things that you know could be better but will never be. Everything is highly disorganized, and team leads focus more on trying to please the founders instead of listening to valid suggestions and recommendations from their teams. There's no real focus on how to make their products better in and out, no real efforts to do user research and do some real analytics. Everything is based on the whims of the CEO (who wants to put cute things on everything even if it's inappropriate) and the incredibly incompetent but power-hungry wife of the CTO. The founders, especially the CTO, have convinced themselves that they are the best and everyone else's ideas and methods are inferior compared to theirs. There's no upward mobility in Spokeo unless you have a relationship with the founders either by blood or marriage. If you're either of those, then expect to go from being intern to having a leadership position in a short amount of time, regardless of how grossly incompetent you are. If you don't have any connections to the founders, then you're out of luck.