Was trying to post this review of VMock as an employer to Glassdoor, but it seems the post doesnt meet their community standards. Thought I should post it somewhere anyhow, in case its of help to individuals in the future considering employment with VMock, the edtech startup. Ive organized this into the standard glassdoor layout, pros, cons, advice to management.

Pros:

First. VMock is a company that’s in a growing and underserved market, i.e. education technology, applying tech to digitize workflows, using tech to enhance content development & delivery., and building learning analytics.  Their primary customer for the moment is career centers at prestigious universities in the US & Europe. This ensures that due to the adoption of a B2B sales model, the company is able to lock clients in for multiple years through their contracts at sky high “$ per resume upload” prices with respect to the B2C competition and get away with it, but obviously hardly for long. As competition develops, the company’s prices will rationalise and adjust downwards. While usually in an industry where both B2B and B2C customers exist, B2B customers pay lower effective prices than B2C customers, here, we see the reverse occurring, which is an unusual dynamic. I would assume that B2C markets operate more effectively and have better price discovery mechanisms and therefore the B2C price being a true indicator of per resume upload costs that the retail customer is willing to pay, B2B prices will adjust downwards over the years due to the fact that VMock currently exceeds the true pricing potential of the service they offer currently. I thus see significant downward traction in B2B prices at the moment, which will affect the company’s bottomline and survivability, going forward.

For the moment, the company should already be profitable on every marginal sale, have positive and healthy unit economics, and should also have a positive net margin by now since its been around 5 years since their base product (resume development and standardization) was launched, and they should have been able to recover the cost of their initial investments in developing the AI, user interfaces, back end supporting systems and infrastructure etc across these 5 years and a 100+ clients later. So. The company should be currently profitable, which is a big deal for a startup to be able to claim. Whats surprising though is that even though they’ve been around for several years, they don’t have any investors apart from those listed for a 2012 funding round of $275k, and if there isn’t any active investor oversight and involvement, then the company may find it difficult to make good operational, tactical, strategic decisions, and execute them well.

The unit economics for VMock also work out well because the company has a “back” office in India that hosts product, tech, design, content management, digital marketing, client management teams. Front office sales staff reside in the US, so this helps lower the cost of operations and helps unit economics favorably and significantly, but also introduces distance between the founders and 99.9% of the company, who operate from the Gurgaon office, bar a couple of sales staff based in the US. This distance, the founders are unable to handle well, results in poor decisions, and a poor culture, as I will explain later on.

Second positive: Good, smart, plush, comfortable office in India. Paying for a good office may have been a smart move on the part of the company (maybe Ive become cynical about most decisions taken by the company?) to bias the mind’s first impression of the company favourably, and set it up to ignore warning signals emitted later on. Sort of like the story of the frog dipping its toes (?) into some comfortable and soothing water, getting in, then being cooked alive as the temperature of the water increases. You, as the potential employee, are the frog here, lulled into a false sense of complacency by the low temperatures of the water.

Third positive: A lot of smart people from good colleges with high potential around, but in the absence of a mentoring environment, this potential is systematically wasted. VMock is not the environment where world class products get built, or rock star sales teams develop, or where talent gets recognized, promoted and honed. It is repeatedly average and mediocre. Employees who recognize this in time leave, those left behind learn to live with their choices.

Cons

Three major issues: Poor and blatantly one sided HR policies, no automated payroll system/no accounting department, and a poor culture

One: An immediate and obvious con is their onboarding process and HR policies. One sided, leaving the candidate with a dirty feeling, as if being treated as second degree chattel. The first experience with the company is negative, starting from HR’s statement that no offer letter will be provided over email, since candidates, in the past, have tended to leverage such offers and leave. At most, what can be provided is an email mentioning that an offer is being extended, with no mention of either the role offered or compensation. Then on the day you join VMock, they will ask you to sign your employment agreement but will only provide you with a copy after a month, again, because VMock suffers from an unhealthily high turnover of employees. Then comes a ridiculously lengthy non compete agreement (upto 3 years) applicable from the date you leave the company. And the cherry on top is a 3 month notice period if the candidate resigns, but no notice period if the company terminates employment. All this from a company started by founders who have conjured up this nonsensical claim that they understand the pain of having to find a job as students and dealing with companies from a position of low strength as students, and who got into this business in order to alleviate such pains.

Two: For a company that reflexively mentions AI as a panacea at the drop of a hat for all questions when interrogated by clients on a sales call, we somehow don’t have an automated payroll processing system or a dedicated accounting department. So salaries perpetually get delayed until mid or late next month. Claims never get processed or are airily dismissed. Stingy, miserly benefits are paid out, including no provident fund payments, and a group medical insurance policy that offers fewer benefits and lower levels of coverage than Ayushman Bharat. Congrats. You slaved and slogged and graduated from an IIT and now have less coverage than that provided by a government funded national health insurance scheme. The company hasn’t optimized their salary structures for tax, so while the company may offer what seems like a good salary, due to an unnecessarily above average tax rate, your take home will be significantly lower than your CTC. Bonuses, promotions, increments are all arbitrarily handed out, with multiple cases of them being verbally promises and then being revoked without explanation.

Three: The decision making of the founder husband wife duo is difficult to comprehend. This may be because they are poor decision takers or because they are far ahead of their time. Either way, at some point in time, one has to wonder, if 99.9% of the company operates from the Gurgaon office, then why do the husband and wife choose to work from the US? Is this the best way to run this company? Especially when the average age of the company’s employees is so low, almost every is fresh out of undergrad school, and the only employees in the US are all experienced sales professionals with most of all sales calls taking place over video. Companies outsource non critical tasks to back offices, however, each and every function in this company cant be non critical. Most if not all of the company are freshers with purely academic credentials but no practical understanding of how to build a product and sell & market the same. If the founders had any guidance to provide, and this is a big if, their being based in India so they could provide continuous mentoring and guidance would make more sense, and prevent innumerable shouting matches over poor requirement discovery & execution that led to lost time and products and tech changes being rushed. More irritatingly, the founder duo use this distance between them and their teams to their great detriment since, in addition to inflated egos, they also have severe trust and control issues, and tend to micromanage extensively. Due to the distances and time zones involved, quite often, you will find yourself being asked to provide over email an accounting of how you’ve spent your time on an hourly and daily basis, and then be questioned on this accounting, in an exercise designed to be humiliating and to reinforce the authority of the founders.

There is a lack of transparency in decision making and around the availability of information. Far from empowering the employees to take decisions and move quickly, especially given that the duo are based abroad, all information is held closely and dearly by the management and any information sharing requires higher authority approval. A quick example. Most SaaS companies would be valued on the basis of the number of monthly, daily or annual active users. Good luck trying to understand any of these metrics for VMock. Or god forbid, to ask for a deep dive to understand engagement metrics better and identify power users and the factors that drive heavy use of their platform. Or to understand what proportion of customers get retained over time. Or what the company’s topline, bottomline, or CAGR are. Or how many clients it has for each product? Or god forbid, if you ask for the prized client list so you can understand how many clients are undergrad, postgrad, US/EU/ANZ based, medical/law/business school based? Or trying to get enough data to construct a sales or marketing funnel. All strategic decisions, all operational decisions, get taken by the husband wife duo at the top, in closed counsel, with the end result that no one knows what the company is doing and why its doing what it is doing. With all responsibilities split between two C level managers on the top, who also share a personal familial relationship, there is an incredibly strong bias towards group think at the highest levels of the company, and the tendency for one of the two to reinforce the other’s thinking, and an inability to hold the other accountable and consequently drive blame downwards into the company, in usually a very insulting fashion. Additional evidence of a bias towards nepotism and hiring “yes men” is displayed by the fact that the CEO’s brother also holds a senior role in the company. Statistically speaking then, establishing a blood line with the CEO/CPO or marrying him/her or a close family member provides the highest chance of being employed and retained by the company. The founders fail to grasp that diversifying the pool of individuals privy to decision making is crucial for building company wide acceptance of decisions taken, and helping inform the company of the thinking driving decision making, in addition to improving the quality of decisions taken. Their continued failure to rectify their flawed notice period policy (3 months notice if you leave, none if the company fires you) stocks the company with “yes men” (apologies for the gender insensitivity here, #MeToo) which results in suboptimal decisions being taken since everyone is perpetually afraid to lose their jobs by standing up for their own thinking or questioning the founders.

On a somewhat tangential note, a particularly egregious fast one that the founders seem to be trying to pull, with tacit or explicit support from HR, is to post fake company reviews online so as to muddy the waters and get potential employees confused about the reality of the company. Apart from the immorality of such actions, this is also representative of the thinking of the founders, i.e., to prioritize short term solutions over long term and sustainable solutions, even if the short term solutions are ridiculously and painfully ineffective and substandard, and to also attack the symptom of the problem and not the problem itself (problem here being deep seated issues with the work culture of the company, vision, execution, and the “holier than thou” attitude of the founders).

Some of the positive reviews posted earlier on glassdoor are just laughable, on account of how divorced from reality such reviews are. A quick glance indicates that most if not all positive reviews are very similar in substance, and lack any substantive detail. If you’re going to fake it, guys, at least put in the heart to be convincing.

My outlook for the company is negative since the most searing and damaging flaw for the company is that its leaders, despite having a stellar education, are poor thinkers, poor learners, don’t read or expose themselves to new thinking, take poor operational and strategic decisions, repeatedly execute poorly and bring substandard products to market, and due to a toxic work environment that values compliance and subservience, drive good employees out the door. In a market where user utilization rates are everything, and companies move quickly to optimize product/market fit before optimizing other aspects of their business, VMock still has no focus on simplifying their ridiculously complicated and value bereft user experience, improving utilization rates, improving their algorithm so that it can meet the expectations of career center coaches, providing advanced analytics and dashboards to users. No one has spent time trying to understand who uses their basic software and for how much time, when is their software used, how do users flow from the landing page to subsequent pages and CTA’s, etc etc. For an AI company, its pretty much flying blind all the time and living on borrowed time.

Advice to management

There doesn’t seem much point providing advice when management is famously non-receptive of it. Internal feedback on product functionalities, roadmaps, strategy, UI/UX design, analytics etc gets routinely dismissed flippantly. The husband wife duo seems to be living in their own Trumpian, delusional world where they twist facts and market occurrences to suit their own conveniently lazy interpretation of reality and data. This same ability also makes them immune to feedback, especially if you weren’t educated at an ivy abroad.

A lot of the weaknesses of the company however can be overcome by making two changes. One. Empower employees to do their job by introducing three month notice periods if the company terminates employment. Two. Bring in a professional CEO, CTO, CPO, CMO, CFO, CBO/CGO, all six of which roles are currently subsumed by two people whose overriding consideration may at times be to optimize their personal, familial relationship as opposed to the company’s valuation. Hardly an environment where there is accountability and transparency in decision making. Family run businesses are not professionally run businesses, and are not employee friendly workplaces, on the most part, with no scope for dissent. VMock is a shining, golden, poster boy example of this reality, in many, many ways.

Kellogg and Chicago are great schools, and Ive known a couple of Chicago grads who were absolutely brilliant and deserved their place in these schools. Sadly, I also know too well that all systems make mistakes, and all processes have a false positive and false negative rate, as do the outcomes of the admissions processes run by Kellogg and Chicago. The VMock cofounders are evidence of the existence of high false positive rates at their colleges.

Run, if you still can.