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Brian Lam was managing a Korean barbecue joint in central Houston last summer when a recruiter messaged him about a sales position at Travis Kalanick's latest startup.
In 2021, their parent company, City Storage Systems, raised $850 million from backers including Microsoft. It's nowBut Kalanick apparently learned a lesson from Uber, where his tumultuous reign was voraciously chronicled by the press. To stay out of the crosshairs of the media, he insisted on secrecy.
Both managers and participants said the company appealed to recruits who were experiencing financial hardship and were looking for a fast-track career in tech. But the program left many recruits ill-prepared to handle their sales job, which boiled down to cold-calling small US restaurants all day to pitch them on using the software to manage their online business.
In fall 2021, Otter leadership set out to improve the company's rank-and-file sales team. Law and another colleague pitched the idea of a sales boot camp similar to those run by other tech companies such as Adobe, SAP, and Yelp. The first class of Otter University started remotely in February 2022 in Toronto while the curriculum was still being finalized. The Houston program launched remotely four months later.OtterU employees said Kalanick supported and seemed excited about the program.
"They always called it an experiment, but I said the experiment is playing with people's lives," said an OtterU employee. Startups – especially sales teams – aren't known for a buttoned-up culture. But the late nights and free-flowing alcohol struck some OtterU employees as inappropriate for the workplace, especially when managers had to deal with hungover teams the next day.
Brian Lam, the Houston recruit, recalled several different people leading his class at different points. The curriculum, including the final score participants needed to graduate, also seemed to change frequently, three employees said. After a few weeks of classroom training, participants were expected to start closing deals. Lam's group was tasked with making at least 60 cold calls a day. Five recruits said they regularly put in hours of unreported overtime to hit their goals.
Instructors also berated students for asking questions about the product or the sales process, said Samul Beal, another Houston trainee."Every time I'd ask a question, I'd get pulled to the side, and it was like, 'Don't tell everyone else or don't bring this up in a meeting. Bring this to your manager,'" Beal said. He quit after three weeks. Recruits like Beal were washing out of the program at an alarming rate.
On the day that Brian Lam had expected to graduate from OtterU, he received a note saying the ceremony was postponed. He said he'd scored high on his written exam and received a perfect score on his product demonstration evaluation, and he'd even earned performance bonuses for hitting certain metrics over the course of the training.
The constant firings, long hours, and frequent changes took a toll on OtterU's staff. Law promised her team big rewards like raises and promotions that never materialized, said four former enablement employees. Then there was the tech itself. Kalanick had promised to make restaurateurs' lives simpler with Otter. But customers routinely complained to salespeople that Otter's software package arrived late and was glitchy, disconnected often, and locked people out of their accounts. One former salesperson who wished to remain anonymous, said they felt guilty selling a product they felt didn't work.
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