With the recent financial convulsions, no investor firm is going to forget about a multi-million dollar investment. No matter whose personal favor got them funded, there will be a manager responsible for their portfolio. It may be one of a dozen the guy has, but someone's paying attention to it. For such transparency, I cannot find hard numbers for Honeycomb, much less their burn rate by department. As a "Field CTO" it may think a public profile keeps him safe, it can cut the other way, especially if their investor firm gets spooked by what their "Field CTO" considers appropriate C-Suite behavior. In my years in corporate prison I have never seen one of its kind make it once they lean hard into identity politics.
I've seen dudes get written up for adding smiley faces to an email (not emojis, mind you, plaintext emoticons like in the ASCII days). Other such (seemingly minor) infractions that I've seen:
- Modifying the signature template on any email that you send out.
- Failing to omit certain contacts from email chains.
- Use of certain language (broad category, but this deals with the usage of language that would "imply" something but not directly say).
It's pretty easy to forget that when you're on the clock and on your work computer, you're a drone that's representing a business and
not yourself.
Modifying your signature template could break the formatting of your email entirely, depending on what you specifically do. Not to mention that the signature provides a sense of uniformity across all company communications.
Keeping a customer (or other such person/group) in copy when you're talking to a different party is always a nightmare to deal with, what with the heightened emphasis on things like information security, privileged information access, and the like.
Also, most HR departments that I know of heavily emphasise that not everyone speaks English as well as you might. Saying something like "Please provide us with a quote, using the information we have provided below" will throw off the foreigner who only understands "Kindly advise a quote of the below."
Knowing how anal people are with email, I fail to see how Honeycomb will attract meaningful, sustained growth (let alone any hires that won't eventually turn over in less than a year). Elliot's almost certainly ensured long-term damage to Honeycomb as a brand with the few weeks (or months) he's spent on LinkedIn thus far.
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