First and foremost, Indigo's valuation has dropped over 90 percent. There has been 5 layoffs in 4 years, and a furlough. The company is not currently stable. I will try to break down what is wrong with Indigo in several sectors:
Middle Management - This is going to depend on the person. Indigo does not train mid level managers, and Directors usually do not have time to train ones that need it. I had 3 direct managers in my 4.5 plus years at Indigo, which is alarming as a potential new employee as it may change quickly. Two were great and remain friends with today. My last one was an absolute disaster. Dishonest at best, habitual liar at worst. I personally went from managing important projects that spanned across the whole company, to doing Excel reports and clean up because my manager wanted to punt everything to other teams so he did not have to deal with it. Completely immature and more concerned about not rocking his boat than helping the company. Unfortunately he was allowed to do this due to lack of oversight, at the detriment of my former dept as a whole and the company. If I could put this experience into one word, it would be insulting.
Executives - The new group had a steep hill to climb because the previous CEO was much more personable and transparent with his employees. He also spent wildly, partially why Indigo is in the state it is in today and why he was removed... But he was a very good communicator to his company and was liked because of it. The new CEO and exec team are definitely not that, and the CEO cannot be trusted. This will sound familiar, but at best he just said things without looking into the validity of what he was saying actually being accurate.. At worst, habitual liar about things that were not even necessary to be dishonest about. What he said ended up not being true happened in such a common clip that if I was an investor I would have trouble believing him. At least one C level person left last layoff because they lied to their entire team about future layoffs, which they passed on from the CEO. The rest of the team were either Tech lifers who could not relate to the Ag industry, or inexperienced at that level and made very immature/poor decisions. This team they thought their customers, farmers, were so technologically stupid they refused to add basic security measures to their platform. They also handle layoffs by title more so than performance. They got rid of a lot of good people in these mass layoffs because their title was X, and kept bad employees because their title was Y. The Head of Engineering came from a company of 10-20 people, now he leads a department of hundreds. He is in way over his head and it shows. This group is why I feel this company is going to not be successful,
Culture - The relationship between Engineer and the business is broken. If you have worked for a tech company before, there is a natural separation here.. But this one is borderline toxic and definitely effecting the business negatively. The team in charge of operations on that side is just not seasoned in some positions and amazing immature in others. They are way too focused on being friends with Engineers, and the next cool toy to play with as opposed to making decisions that are in the best interest in the company. I worked with a lot of great Engineers, and I think that many will agree that there are way too many Engineers at the company as it is currently constructed. They also need more experience in the Director/Head of Engineer position because the train has been going in the wrong direction for a long time and it is not getting any better. The silos and lack of cohesion are glaring, with most silos only caring about the success of their goals by any means (money) necessary as opposed to the company actually making money and being successful. It feels more like a group of people trying to suck the company dry, add a few things to their resume, and moving onto the next job.
