Thank you for your response.
It’s important to note that Emerson hasn’t worked at Dose since 2017 so none of those Glassdoor reviews were about him
Glassdoor states 12 of these comments are directed at Emerson Spartz as CEO.
Additionally, if you have as many employees as Dose has, you will inevitably get some bad reviews
This repeated statement that every large org will have the same problem does not seem to be correct. There might be some disappointed or unhappy ex-employees—but not every company will have an average of 0% management approval and a rating of 2.7 while employees repeat the same very serious issues over a long period of time (starting in 2014).
Lastly, Nonlinear had been predominantly funded by not Emerson. He’s been less than 10% of our funds and we’ve been funded by all the major EA funders.
I am referring to the initial funder playing the most critical role, enabling an organization to jump-start easily (increasing the possibility of securing outside funding in the future) vs. having to rely on external funders / having to gain their trust first.
I am surprised about the immediacy of strong downvotes of my comment within the first couple of minutes (7 votes). It does not seem to be such a clearly poor comment, nor does the strong negative reaction seem like the standard EA community behavior.
After a ~5min online research on Emerson Spartz’s past CEO role at his previous company “Dose”, it looks like there were a lot more “disgruntled ex-employee[s]” (even if this is external to EA).
Overall, CEO approval is at 0%. Some examples out of the many:
There are many more negative and honestly very sad comments on Glassdoor.
Given the time it took me to look this up, I wonder if background checks are ever being done at EA in the first place (specifically when multi-b/millionaires such as SBF and Emerson feel the urge to embellish their reputation by suddenly becoming “highly caring altruists” without having displayed any signs of altruism before). Highly wealthy people could simply be treated like new hires at regular companies because they have a lot more power and are more likely to have different intentions than the average EA.
Doing quick background checks is a very low-cost and reasonable thing to do in order to protect EA and its members.
The problem with people like Emerson S. is that they come with a lot of private resources, enabling organizations like Nonlinear to pop up, rise and survive out of nowhere. They never had to gain the trust or follow standards like everyone else had to—they can just self-fund.
They’re not subject to the same scrutiny as others.
This is even worse, given that they learned how to get so far/accumulate so much wealth in the first place: they know how to behave strategically to get what they want.
I am truly sorry for anyone who has had to endure such management practices inside and outside of EA. I hope that background checks will be normalized to avoid such problems in the future.