WTF happened with Workrise

My thoughts on the overall company history, internal fuckery, and speculations that led up to yesterday’s massive layoff. I can only speculate based on what I know and I don’t have all the details or even complete history, but I’ll try… Let’s start at the beginning: RigUp was focused on oil and gas staffing and the company did that well. The founders wanted to present the company as a tech company to use a higher multiplier and eventually get to that $3B valuation (and even plan for $10B at YE ‘22). However, the company as (and is) just a staffing company run on spreadsheets. Only around 15% of their revenue went through the tech and it was only o&g. To present themselves better to the investors, they promised to expand into renewables, construction, and more. This is when they acquired several small staffing companies, and it just happened to be during the pandemic. The acquisitions were completely botched because outside of the founders knowing how to work the financials to present the company, the bro culture and lack of experience positioned the company with “leaders” that had no clue what they were doing. The person responsible for the M&A instead of being fired for fucking them up was promoted to a C-level overseeing HR. This is an ex-Uber guy that had no prior experience in people leadership. The company had no idea what they were doing. From the prior operations leader that didn’t do anything about the new acquired companies’ operations as far as integrating them. To him taking on HR with no knowledge of HR or experience. To the head of legal being straight out of college and a childhood friend of the founders. To firing the one good CTO that knew what he was going and putting in another that had a fraction of the experience. Everything there was fucked twice over. However, while the actual competent CTO was there (prior to the musical chairs at the heads of departments) , the leadership locked in the last round of funding. I can only assume the investors pushed strongly on IPO and possibly made that a requirement. The company hired like crazy to make itself look very mature (what you do prior to IPO) and started work on getting there, but they found out they needed A LOT of work to actually be IPO-ready. Mostly because of the fucked up acquisitions they hid the fuck ups from. The head of finance left. Head of Eng (I call him CTO) was pushed out. Head of Ops that fucked it all up was moved to oversee HR since the head of HR left. Later Witte called himself President. And so much more… All these things were done to buy time and maybe hope for some magical dust to fix things. Eventually the company realized they can’t call themselves a tech company since only a tiny fraction of revenue flows through the product. They realized the botched acquisitions in renewables were fucked and created operational nightmares. So they decided to cut them out and refocus on o&g and make a strong push to put all o&g revenue on the product by EOY ‘22. This way they can claim to be a tech company and get rid of the “problem children” that weren’t integrated properly. Well, the board must have gotten fed up with the fact the last two years were wasted and this should have been done before the rebrand, so they most likely forced the incompetent leadership to take an even more drastic action. This is how we got to hundreds of people getting laid off yesterday. The leadership needs to be pushed out or this Incompetence will continue. The idea and market for the company and its growth is there, but it’s the incompetent leaders that give themselves new titles, raises, and that think they know what they’re doing that are slowly burning this huge opportunity of a company down. #layoff #workrise #austin