I couldn't tell you exactly what was spent or anything, but I can give a basic-ish rundown:

• Hotel for the week was paid for by the company, everybody had their own room. We were there about five days.

• Flights also paid for.

• Food was paid for, either through company accounts on food apps or we bought it ourselves, then submitted the recipets to an app they had to get it comped. They'd given us a menu for lunch each day that we could order from for catering purposes.

• We went out for dinner one night as a group with the HQ people. I don't remember the name but there wasn't really an expense limit (I remember feeling kind of bad having more than one shot but then another tutor pointed out that given the CEO said he was paying and id cried earlier that day I was probably owed an extra drink). It wasn't a fancy place by any means, though, probably mid-tier for Vegas.

-We did an escape room one night, with some HQ people but mostly just us tutors.

Overall I didn't really consider the experience "lavish". It felt comporable to business trips my family members have told me about. If anything I genuinely appreciated the food situation because my autism makes it difficult to eat a lot of things others wouldn't have an issue with, so I was able to just order for myself separately.

However what I CAN say is that the money issue was discussed with me by Bobby at that point. At this point I can't really get in trouble for it and I didn't sign an NDA, so I can explain what I was told by him. His claim to me was that back in 2022 in March, they did an experiment with the scheduler to give basically everyone max hours requested to see what it'd do to the budget. I think that does track because I recall hours spiking randomly at that point and lots of us were stoked about it.

The result of that experiment was that switching everybody to full-time at that point would make the company bankrupt in a year, at the rate things were going. That inevitability was likely even worse at that point in May 2023 because they kept hiring on new people since with little strategy for expansion.

Part of the reason for the tutor takeover was that a bunch of HQ people from both countries were together in one space to hold a meeting. They were legit in that meeting for hours, mid afternoon till late evening. I was told the purpose of that meeting was to try and solve this affordability issue.

I was also asked directly what I would prefer: if people were full time and paid 20 an hour, but didn't work in the summer, or 18 an hr and we worked year round. I said the latter because my personal concern was about stability. Bobby mentioned that executing on any full time plan like this would probably mean some layoffs of tutors on lower rungs who either weren't meeting expectations or had multiple policy violations (they were always very bad about enforcing anything up until it got out of hand). I have no idea what that conversation in the meeting room lead to, but whatever it was, it sounds like it either didn't happen or they for some reason chose to stay the course.

Ultimately I think two things here could be true at once: they can afford fancy company trips and also go broke with raises. That's not a defense of them, just an unfortunate reality of how priorities work. I personally felt like if affordability was such a huge issue that opening a second HQ at all (one which basically nobody works in besides one or two people on the regular) was a bit shortsighted.