Congratulations! Paul Mountford is your new COO!
He just left our company as our former CEO (Riverbed). In his tenure, we had 3 massive layoffs in 18 months. He did absolutely nothing else help us grow in any way. If Pure Storage hired this guy, they are throwing in the towel.
I am sorry for the Pure Storage employees but you just got a bag of trash left on your doorstep.
If anyone is catching the undertones of performance management and over investment this morning, you can bet that big change is on the horizon.
Sounds like they needed his experience. Really he's a master of layoffs.
Layoffs to get rid of knowledgeable employees, crank down on benefits, get rid of more and more employees so they can hire again at lower salaries and then get more people.
Of course given office culture; people will silo and team up to then have other employees/valuable people removed from the office. Overall it makes sense but the general company is trying to get profitable.
This will need
Overall as a business/stock profitability move, it makes sense. It's all about cutting costs and more. And at the end of the day it's what they have to do to then become "just another company" like all the others. And to do that, it means to get rid of costly employees, benefits, options, health coverage options and more. This further means more workloads as they work to sell more to try to get more hires as well.
And to further do this they'll work to then have layoffs of course but in the typical profession. This just means to ramp up work, performance metrics, micromanaging so everyone looks bad at all times. As a result the company will have the cycling layoffs at the end of the month out of nowhere.
The company is highly reliant currently on large profit margins. The downside is that this means they're problematic and have issues competing. In a crowded market that has many competitors though and others cemented in by long standing vendors; it now becomes a numbers crunching for less profits or more which hurts the large profit margins as they have tons of competition.
And leveraging debt; and repeatedly lowering the stock value by being unprofitable (yes even the months that it's claimed were profitable were done so through debt/stock loss); the company has to change to get to a profitable margin.
Like it or hate it; what will happen is culture changes and layoffs to the point this won't be the same company. Succeed or fail; Paul Mountford will be paid very well to do this and even if staying or leaving will be rewarded millions and millions more in bonuses while they hurt those who do the work with the actual customers.
Pure Storage is quick to hire, micromanage to death then quick to fire. They also do questionable stuff to skirt this as "bad performance" so they can fire employees on the last day of the month.
Thanks to "Unlimited Time Off" they won't pay this out.
Thanks to "At will states for site locations" they can get rid of people quickly/instantly
HR ignores any valid issues and protects people doing bad things like rampant office peer pressure for alcoholism or biased workloads, shifts and more.
Non-friend employees will be given bad shifts then moved to be fired quickly/after burning out
Time off is frowned upon
And more, so it seems like a match made in heaven. If anything it appears that Pure Storage hired him because he's so successful at getting rid of employees and having Layoffs. This way they can skirt small number of employees all the time to reduce costs after burning employees out to rinse/repeat and get new ones.
The company isn't an open culture and really silos employees, they state anyone can help anyone or more but then trash people for it as punishment. Long term career goals to stay with the company is frowned upon as "sounds like you don't like doing your current job" and more. And then used to then bash the employee further.
Ideas are often stolen then others get credit for so it does sound like a match made in...
From their financials, they are having issues scaling the business towards profitability. They need someone to come in and tweak the business model slightly or they will continue to bleed investors out of equity to keep the business going. I don't know Paul or what he has built his career around, but if he is able to make some changes to the operational model of Pure, he may be able to bring Pure into GAAP profitability.
What in h*&l were they thinking?