Connected reviews

Thank you for your review. We're sorry to hear your experience didn't match our intention of being the best place to work. As we mature, we will always have room for improvement. We would have loved to hear your feedback while you were still with us, but we'd still rather have it here than not at all. One thing we have to agree to disagree on his the quality of our engineers. Our team members have worked on products for Apple, Facebook, Instagram, Tesla and Uber. We receive applications from some of the top engineers and students across the country, and we hire less than 1% of those applicants. As a services company, we partner with our clients to build the best products. One part of that is challenging each other to find what's right, not who's right. That's why some of the world’s biggest brands trust us to build their next generation of connected experiences. We’re working today on products that will be used by millions of people in the coming years. We will do a better job of making sure our team knows that our clients pushing us to be better is about their passion for their own customers, and respecting us enough to rise to meet the challenge. We don't compete on salary, because we believe it doesn't attract the people we love working shoulder to shoulder with every day. We want people who want to work with us because of the culture, client work and cutting edge technologies. We do offer a generous equity sharing program, which we can do because we're 100% employee owned. We will do a better job of setting expectations earlier. We are proud of our startup energy, and we believe deeply in what we say internally and externally. I've been fed my fair share of buzzwords, and I have no intention of paying that forward. We will do a better job of demonstrating that we mean what we say. If you have anything else you would like to share, please feel free to reach out to me at mike.stern@connectedlab.com so we can set up a time for me to listen. Thanks again for your review, and best of luck in your future endeavours. Mike Stern CEO & Co-founder

Hello Connector, This is Mike. It was hard to read the feedback that you shared but, as with every review, I read them and I respond to them, just as I am with yours. Your review made it clear that you don’t feel there is a sense of transparency. I am sorry about that. I hope that others reading this (including other Connectors) appreciate the lengths we go to in order to create transparency and to prioritize our culture and values. We’ve won a large number of awards for our culture and our workplace, and we have an overwhelming number of Connectors who feel positively about our culture. I have shared openly that we’ve experienced bumps over the last 5 years but we continue to learn and push to get better. I value your concerns about transparency and culture, but I also know it isn’t a feeling that is shared widely. We’ve had a really positive response to many of the efforts that have been made in this space. Your feedback tells me that we still have work to do and I would like to hear more about it. Please email/slack me and let’s get a coffee. Tell me straight about what is working and what isn’t from your perspective. Regarding your feedback about career growth and compensation, I agree that we need to get smarter and create more clarity around it. We also need to iterate more quickly on it. This is one of the special challenges an organization faces when they rapidly scale to almost 200 people in just a few years. It’s solvable but usually takes some iterations and years to get right. We’re not a start-up anymore, and we’re still not a mature and well-oiled machine. We’re in a very unique scale-up stage. But we’re making progress and feedback like this helps. Keep it coming. Regarding your comments about allocations, I hope you can see the progress that we have already made. More progress is coming very soon. We have learned a lot this year figuring out how to run this process at scale, and are actioning this as I write. We now have a much more diversified client base, and with a large number of disciplines and specializations to manage. This is good for the business - including for you - and for our clients, but it makes allocations more complex than it was in the past. Please share more feedback in a month if you haven’t yet seen progress. On your “Advice to Management”, Connected doesn’t ask HR or anyone else in the organization to write reviews on Connected’s behalf. I am appreciative of every piece of feedback that is received - positive and negative. Where it says that the response is from the CEO, it’s been written by me. I write them from the heart, and I try to use these opportunities to be helpful to you and other readers. As always, thanks for your feedback. The discussion it prompts is healthy and helps us get better. This is our teaching/learning culture in action. Please email me directly to continue this conversation. You might be surprised to learn how much I care about what you have to say and how we can work together to make Connected better. Thanks, Mike