An open letter to Aditya Rao, Lightspeed and Tiger

I am an employee with Localoye. I was one of the early employees after the funding given by Tiger and Lightspeed. Since such famous investors were involved, I had a lot of trust that the company would do well. But things turned very different and I was shocked to see how a Tiger funded company behaves.

The very first few days of funding was just about partying. The entire tech, marketing and hr team used to sleep in the ceo's house. They would drink and smoke the whole day and were just blowing away investor's money. The servicing and the onboarding team was the only team working to achieve the company goals, but we were never treated well.

All recruitment of the company was done at Prost with the CEO smoking on our face, and abusing us. Since this was a Tiger company, we thought that the ceo must be a cool person for his attitude.

We moved to a new office which was huge. The company spent big to take this office and also a huge amount to get painting done, then make the office fancy. The company has this concept of Old Locos who are the original lot., These people have the freedom to do whatever shit they want in the company. Rules are different for Old and new locos. Old locos spend unlimited money, get unlimited leaves, shout, party.

Everyday, the old Locos (which includes our marketing head, hr head) would drink in office. Drinking sessions would start anytime in the day and continue till late.

Marketing budgets were in the range of 3-5 crores a month with no logic on how good or bad the company is. The company kept hiring more and more people. In between all this, the company got a new CBO who had only one job- shout and insult people. She insulted everyone from the supply head to the service head the whole day long. She had a habit of passing personal remarks. She had her favourites and would only speak with them. The others were only to shout at.

In a few months, when the company realized that money was becoming difficult, 90 employees were suddenly laid off. People who were a week old in the company were also asked to go. The ceo didn't have the vision to hire someone even a week in advance. Such was the brain our ceo had. After the firing session, the CEO and the old locos celebrated. While so many people had lost jobs and were left without a future, the ceo was happily drinking and smoking.

Tech and product team are given a special treatment. They are taken out for special treats. They can take as many leaves as they want. They enter the office at 1 (if they do come, which itself is rare). The ceo was managing product and tech- no tech release was ever on time. In fact, we never saw any tech improvement or release until this Jan. This January, we released a new website and app after spending a year of work. The website had nothing but bugs. Nothing was working and still crashes almost every day.

In between all of this, the ceo's marriage was fixed with the sister of the hr head. This happened in October last year. Since then, the ceo and the hr have never been seen in office. The old locos also have only been involved in preparing for Aditya's wedding.

This was just a very basic context of what all has been going. The main intent of this letter is appeal to all those who can help us.We know that the company has run out of cash. But we have no idea where we are headed or what our future is. We haven't seen the CEO in the past 3 months except 1 day when he came (on that day also, when we asked what our future was. He replied saying that there is alcohol in life because of which nobody needn't worry about anything). We have nobody we can speak with. Jobs aren't available in the market. Because of being in office, we are not able to spend time looking for jobs either. Though we never see most people in office, we are shouted at for not coming to work even for a single day. We need clarity. No ceo, no hr is available in office.

It is a sincere appeal to the investors to help us. You have left us helpless. Please show some care. You are responsible for funding this fucker Aditya who has no mercy for us. We need help. And we don't know where to go. Don't make us lose trust in startups or tiger.