I joined in 2015 and left after 2 months. I had left a fast growing late-stage startup, AppDynamics, where revenue was doubling every 12 months, from $75M to about $150M when I left. The director of engineering at Optimizely who hired me said their revenue was doubling too, from $40M to $80M. At the next all hands a few weeks later, the CEO said revenue had been declining slightly for 2 straight quarters. At lunch, after the all hands, no one seemed to care. Someone literally complained that their friends at AirBnb got duck for lunch and we didn’t. The director either lied to me or didn’t know. People were nice and smart, but it was clearly going off a cliff. It seems for many B2B startups the march up the value chain to enterprise is challenging, especially with regards to pricing. I remember the president of sales at AppDyanmics would not cut prices to compete against New Relic in the self-serve market. At Optimizely, I recall enterprises were pissed at being charged more just for better SLAs. From other comments it sounds like they finally figured out the enterprise pricing model by jettisoning self-service. Not sure if that was the right call or they could have found better success by avoiding the pricing consultant fiasco. Though I vaguely recall they were losing too much money per customer so that needed fixing. In any event, it’s hard enough to make money in startups as an employee, but declining revenue at a growth stage startup is a death sentence for your equity. I liked the people at Optimizely, the transparent culture was great, and I wished it would have done better, but the writing was on the wall. Sure enough, not long after leaving the first round of layoffs came, private equity invested, and the announcement was revenues doubled over the prior 18 months, minus the detail of the last 6 being flat to down. Sorry to hear about the impact on you. This is a problem with the current state of startups staying private longer and why I likely won’t work for one that doesn’t have an extended exercise window [1].
[1] https://zachholman.com/posts/fuck-your-90-day-exercise-windo...