Pollen’s Collapse: “$200M Raised” but Staff Unpaid
blog.pragmaticengineer.comAm I the only one who would expect an "events and festival tech startup" that "... organized unique 'event experiences' featuring superstars such as Justin Bieber" to be capable of being scammy to people? Make its people feel good while they get lied to, slightly more than normal for a company? I think "Fyre festival".
A glassdoor rating means nothing, it's always spammed by marketing and companies can remove whatever they like.
The events space seems to attract a lot of shady business practices. It's not even outright scams like the Fyre Festival, but boring legitimate businesses like Ticketmaster ripping off customers with service fees.
What a scummy place to work. They ripped off customers and stole people's pension contributions. The fact that they were prepared to do this suggests that an ugly end was always likely.
I'm not saying what they did was ok but I understand their thought process.
In their minds they had done everything right, and every year they raised more money. They figured they had the fundraising round in the bag so they could move forward with their spending plan and they money would be there. Obviously it didn't happen, and (now in denial) they figured they would delay payments until next month, and the board members who weren't in denial saw the writing on the wall, disagreed with the companies decisions, and left.
I think there were certainly issues with wrong priorities but this seems more like a classic case of denial than a CEO who's trying to scam his employees. He just couldn't accept his billion(?) dollar company was actually worth nothing, and frankly I'm not sure if I could accept this reality well either
Sure, except:
* They claimed to have raised 150 million when they in fact raised around 1 million
* They repeatedly claimed there was no risk of missing payroll when in fact, there was a very tangible risk of missing payroll
* They made promises of deal updates and town halls which they repeatedly reneged on
* They made important changes like dropping health insurance coverage without informing employees, which has real tax and legal (not to mention medical) consequences for the employees.
I'm surprised the failure to deposit pension deductions isn't treated as a more serious failure. Knowing nothing about UK law... is that not some sort of crime?
Robert Maxwell went down for pension fraud. https://www.ipe.com/tales-of-pension-fund-abuse/14159.articl... https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2011/nov/03/pre... Ended with Maxwell "missing" from his yacht Lady Ghislaine, named after his daughter. Those names might seem familiar. Before his disappearance Robert asked his good friend Jeffrey Epstein to take care of his daughter Ghislaine.
This is not a collapse. It's hubris, poor financial management, and a complete breach of trust.
I don't understand you're objection to the word collapse? It's also consistent with your description...
Collapse implies that it was sudden and unavoidable. All of this was the result of an executive team that didn't want to sit down and have tough conversations with staff.
As the article mentions, tons of other VC-funded companies have gone bankrupt before, but those bankruptcies did not end in disaster like Pollen did.