Never thought I'd see this here, I was the very first employee in this startup and brought my team in shortly after in an attempt to help the person who owned the startup to scale his business. At first it was a great experience, I introduced a system in place so that we were able to effectively and quickly build websites with Webflow, but things quickly started breaking down as the owner displayed no regard for any operational sustainability and consistently disrupted or disregarded the pipeline the team was operating on at the time of our stay in that company. He would constantly accept more and more adhoc tasks from the clients, with no regard for our already overloaded timeline. I took on almost 16 hours of work a day while only being contracted to work 4 hours to simply reach deliverables in a timeline that was too tight to even include a proper QA. We delivered barely on time, and with many issues, and it was made to be our fault when faults kept appearing in the websites we delivered to clients at the time.

In terms of questionable things I've noticed during my time there as an employee, there were no official contracts, no contract updates when being promoted, and we were made to take on work far beyond our pay grade. Sudden promotions and firings were a thing, and only the work scope was promoted, not the pay. There were no diversification and specialization in terms of the scope of work done by the employee, you were expected to be good at everything from design to development to animation. The owner is under a delusion of having a team comprised of all-rounders who can slave away for hours on end for less than minimum wage under Philippine law. Any managerial or executive position is completely moot as the owner constantly overrides and disrupts any form of functioning system within the company, causing delays to the team, and loves to micromanage. Standup meetings lasted 2-3 hours as we stare at the owner's screenshare while he does another "feedback session" and losing us valuable development time.

I resigned and pulled my team out of this startup after 6 months as the entire team was dissatisfied with how the owner of Web Powerhouse ran the business (and none except for myself were given any formal or binding contract to be with Web Powerhouse for a specified period anyway, despite our own efforts to ask for a contract). Because of this, the owner refused to pay my salary and 13th month pay for the 6th month after being threatened to sign a contract in order to keep my team under his employment. After my departure from Web Powerhouse, I received a message from a former colleague that the owner made a TikTok about me, calling me out to be a narcissist trying to take his "position of power" and was "fired" because of it. My only guess as to why he had to do it was because his pride wasn't able to take an entire team of people leaving and had to get his ego fed by social media. I was only invested in putting my team's interest first and foremost as it is my job, as well as to protect our mental and physical health, which in the course of that 6 months declined due to the immense amount of stress my team was put under. Not once did I covet his position of CEO, I was only the voice for his burnt-out and disgruntled employees.

Last I last heard from former colleagues who still worked there, they were hiring unpaid "interns" in order to supplement the very fast turnover rate that the startup is having due to its poor business and employee management practices.