Roku’s unique culture is being tested by a surge of new employees
Roku co-founder and CEO Anthony Wood worked at Netflix in 2007, but he says his company’s cultural similarities to the streaming giant are mostly coincidental.
“The culture at Roku was the same before I worked at Netflix,” Wood said in an interview. “Just similar philosophies.”
Netflix and Roku have culture documents in which theyliken themselves to sports teams.
“Working at Roku is like being part of a professional sports team,” Wood wrote in a 2015 document that every employee receives. “We put extreme care into recruiting the best people; we pay well in a competitive market; encourage excellent teamwork, and expect everyone to perform at a high level.”
One former executive said every job at Roku is like being a “field goal kicker,” where employees are expected to accomplish specific, detailed goals. Some employees thrive under the pressure. If they can’t, they won’t be there long.
“We expect you to do a good job,” Wood said. “If you don’t do a good job, you’re going to get fired eventually.”
Wood and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings point to their cultures as a reason for their companies’ success. But both cultures can also lead to an environment of fear and confusion — though for different reasons.
At Netflix, as The Wall Street Journal explained in a 2018 story, employees formally review each other, giving blunt feedback to bosses and underlings alike. Workers “sunshine” errors, offering up public apologies and acknowledgments of failures.
“We expect you to do a good job. If you don’t do a good job, you’re going to get fired eventually.”Anthony WoodCEO, Roku
In contrast, Roku doesn’t give any performance reviews at all. Wood has also made the unusual decision of paying employees based on a market rate rather than giving raises tied to internal performance. That’s irritated some younger employees who have expected a perfunctory raise every year at performance review time, said Wood.
“We have a lot of younger employees now, and they are very focused on getting raises,” Wood said. “You know, I’ve been here a year, I should get a raise. And, you might not get a raise. Or you might. It just depends on what we think the rate is for you. Sometimes they understand and adapt, sometimes they don’t understand, and they quit and then they post on Glassdoor. So, it’s a bit of a cultural mismatch.”
It can be difficult to figure out market rate, Wood acknowledged, especially because California and New York state laws prohibit asking employees how much they’re getting paid. But Roku can glean competitive salaries because it knows what it needs to pay to poach employees from other companies, Wood said.
Read the published culture documents from Roku and Netflix
Excelling in ambiguity
Annual reviews aren’t necessary because employees should be getting real-time feedback, Wood said.
“The work is hard, but it is also rewarding, and I am given a lot of autonomy,” said Taylor Yanez, a Roku engineer. “We don’t do annual reviews, which are a huge time suck.”
But while Yanez said he was given instant feedback by peers, seven former Roku employees who left in the last 18 months said they felt confused by Roku’s culture. They spoke with CNBC on condition of anonymity, either because they feared potential backlash or because contractual language in their severance packages forbids speaking about their firings.
“I literally don’t know why I was fired,” said one recently departed manager. “It’s the strangest place I’ve ever worked.”
Former employees said while they were assigned specific tasks, bosses evaluated them on different metrics because goals frequently changed as Roku grew. In addition to no performance reviews, Roku has very little hierarchy— almost all Roku engineers are called “senior software engineers,” regardless of tenure or role. Mix in a recent surge of new employees — Roku has increased headcount almost threefold, to more than 1,900 employees, since its 2017 IPO — and the result can be confusing.
Several ex-Roku employees said their bosses told them that working in ambiguous settings was part of the job. That runs counter to the Roku culture document, which claims, “Roku teams communicate clearly, in real time with each other and with other teams across the company. Plans, milestones, and strategic context are broadly known.”
“There’s no formal training,” said one mid-level executive, “At Roku, finding information is on you.”
Roku is trying to improve some of its organizational infrastructure as it grows, including formalizing an internship orientation for the first time this year, two of the people said.
“We compete to attract and retain the best talent anywhere and treat people like adults,” a Roku spokesperson said. “We provide onboarding and training for new and existing employees and seek those who are particularly resourceful, innovative, and self-sufficient. And we have a culture of real-time feedback, which has been remarkably successful.”
Netflix with a twist
Netflix and Roku offer unlimited vacation time, giving employees the right to dictate their own schedules as long as they can get their work done. Both have purposefully flat organizational structures, deemphasizing titles and hierarchy.
But unlike Netflix and other large technology companies, Roku offers few external employee perks, such as on-site day care, daily free catered lunches, inexpensive health plans or extensive personal wellness benefits. Roku doesn’t even match 401(k) contributions.
Instead, Wood has chosen to funnel that money into workers’ salaries, believing employees should be in charge of how they spend their money. Every past and present Roku employee who spoke with CNBC said the company compensated at or beyond their expectations. It pays a base salary and grants restricted stock units, though it doesn’t give bonuses.
Given the stock’s performance, it’s easy to see why employees have been eager to stick with the company. Roku shares have gained about 2,000% since the company’s IPO.
Roku’s senior leadership website page also illustrates a lack of diversity — including no women. That will change soon. Wood said Roku just announced a new head of human resources, Kamilah Mitchell-Thomas, previously Dow Jones’ chief people officer, who will replace current HR leader Troy Fenner. Roku’s board does have three women of nine members.
But Wood said diversity for diversity’s sake won’t dictate whom he hires.
“My focus is hiring the best people I can find,” Wood said.
Wood said he meets weekly with an executive coach, Dave Krall, who was Roku’s president and chief operating officer in 2010 and, before that, CEO of Avid Technology. He defines his leadership as hiring the right people and allowing them the freedom to do their job.
“The leadership a company needs changes as it grows,” Wood said. “When you’re 15 or 20 people, I’m the product leader at that point. As it gets bigger and you hire more senior people, you don’t have to do that anymore and they don’t want you to do that, because that’s their job. I used to do our product road map. I don’t do that anymore. These days, we have new initiatives. Pushing us into new business areas and expanding our businesses are where I’m hands-on today.”
WATCH: There’s a lot of room to keep growing in the streaming business: Roku CEO
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivers the keynote address during the Nvidia GTC 2025 at SAP Center on March 18, 2025 in San Jose, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Nvidia said on Tuesday that it will take a quarterly charge of about $5.5 billion tied to exporting H20 graphics processing units to China and other destinations. The stock slid more than 6% in extended trading.
On April 9, the U.S. government told Nvidia it would require a license to export the chips to China and a handful of other countries, the company said in a filing.
The disclosure is the strongest sign so far that Nvidia’s historic growth could be slowed by increased export restrictions on its chips, which the U.S. government says can be used to create supercomputers for military uses. Nvidia reports fiscal first-quarter results on May 28.
During President Biden’s administration, the U.S. restricted AI chip exports in 2022 and then updated the rules the following year to prevent the sale of more advanced AI processors. The H20 is an AI chip for China that was designed to comply with U.S. export restrictions. It generated an estimated $12 billion to $15 billion in revenue in 2024.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on the company’s last quarterly earnings call in February that revenue from China had dropped to half of pre-export control levels. Huang warned that competition in China is growing, and for the second straight year, Nvidia listed Huawei as a competitor in its annual filing.
China is Nvidia’s fourth-largest region by sales, after the U.S., Singapore, and Taiwan, according to the company’s annual report. More than half of its sales went to U.S. companies in its fiscal year that ended in January.
Nvidia’s H20 chip is comparable to the H100 and H200 AI chips used in the U.S. and other countries, but it has slower interconnection speeds and bandwidth. It’s based on a previous generation of AI architecture called Hopper introduced in 2022. Nvidia is now focusing on selling its current generation of AI chips, called Blackwell.
DeepSeek, the Chinese company whose competitive AI model R1 unveiled earlier this year upended markets, used H20 chips in its research.
In addition to the existing Chinese export controls, Nvidia also faces new restrictions on what it can export starting next month, under “AI diffusion rules” first proposed by the Biden administration.
Nvidia has argued that further controls on its chips would stifle competition and potentially even erode U.S. competitiveness in technology. The company previously said it moved some of its operations, including testing and distribution, out of China after the 2022 export controls.
At the company’s annual conference last month, when asked about Chinese export controls, Huang said Nvidia works to comply with the law, but he also noted that about half of the world’s AI researchers are from China, and many of those work at U.S.-based AI labs.
Nvidia said in Tuesday’s filing that the U.S. government told the company on Monday that the license requirement for H20 chips would be in effect “for the indefinite future.”
Nvidia shares have dropped 16% this year, largely due to President Trump’s announcement of widespread tariffs on top trading partners. While exemptions have been made on various electronics products, including smartphones, computers and semiconductors, Trump and some officials said over the weekend that the reprieve was temporary and part of plans to apply separate tariffs to the sector.
Shares of Advanced Micro Devices dropped more than 7% in after-hours trading on Tuesday following Nvidia’s disclosure. AI chipmaker Broadcom fell almost 4%.
WATCH: Nvidia says U.S. requires license to export H20 products to China
Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma Inc., after the morning sessions at the Allen & Co. Media and Technology Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, on July 11, 2024.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Design software maker Figma said on Tuesday that it has submitted paperwork to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering.
The confidential filing lands 16 months after the company scrapped a deal to be acquired by Adobe for $20 billion due to regulatory pressure in the U.K. The San Francisco startup had originally agreed to the deal 2022. Adobe paid Figma a $1 billion termination fee.
Figma’s software is popular among designers inside companies who need to collaborate on prototypes for websites and apps. The company was valued at $12.5 billion in a 2024 tender offer.
“There are two paths that venture-funded startups go down,” Dylan Field, Figma’s co-founder and CEO, said in an interview with The Verge last year. “You either get acquired or you go public. And we explored thoroughly the acquisition route.”
The announcement lands at a precarious moment for the tech IPO market, which has been largely dormant since late 2021. The Trump presidency was expected to revive new offerings due to promises of less burdensome regulations.
But after filing their prospectuses with the SEC, fintech company Klarna and online ticket marketplace StubHub delayed their IPOs earlier this month following the market turmoil caused by Trump’s announcements on widespread tariffs. Digital banking service Chime, which had filed confidentially with the SEC, also postponed its planned offering.
Turo, a car-sharing service, withdrew its IPO prospectus in February, three years after filing its initial prospectus.
Figma was founded in 2012 and is backed by investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Durable Capital, Greylock Partners, Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital. The company, which ranked 26th on CNBC’s Disruptor 50 list in 2024, had about $600 million in annual revenue as of early last year.
— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.
Technology
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg considered spinning off Instagram from Facebook in 2018: FTC trial
Thilina Kaluthotage | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg considered spinning out Instagram in 2018 on concerns about the rising threat of antitrust litigation against Facebook, according to an email presented Tuesday in a Washington, D.C. courtroom.
During Zuckerberg’s second day of testimony in Meta’s antitrust trial with the Federal Trade Commission, lawyers representing the FTC introduced an email from May 2018, in which Zuckerberg appeared to comment on the possibility of separating the photo-sharing app his company purchased in 2012 for $1 billion.
“And i’m beginning to wonder whether spinning Instagram out is the the only structure that will accomplish a number of important goals,” Zuckerberg wrote in the email. “As calls to break up the big tech companies grow, there is a non-trivial chance that we will be forced to spin out Instagram and perhaps WhatsApp in the next 5-10 years anyway. This is one more factor we should consider.”
Facebook bought Instagram in 2012, when the photo app had 13 employees and Zuckerberg was poised to take his company public in what, at the time, was the largest tech IPO on record. The purchase of Instagram and 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp for $19 billion are at the heart of the blockbuster antitrust trial that kicked off Monday and could last weeks.
The FTC alleges that Meta monopolizes the social networking market, and has argued that the company shouldn’t have been able to complete those acquisitions. The agency is seeking to cleave the apps from Meta as a possible remedy.
Meta disputes the FTC’s allegations and claims the regulator mischaracterizes the competitive landscape and fails to acknowledge a number of rivals like TikTok and Apple’s iMessage, and not merely other apps like Snapchat. Earlier in the trial, the FTC also presented an Oct. 2013 email in which Zuckerberg told other Facebook executives that Snap CEO Evan Spiegel rebuffed his $6 billion offer to buy Snapchat.
Zuckerberg also said in the 2018 email that the company’s “best estimates are that, had Instagram remained independent, it would likely be around the size of Twitter or Snapchat with 300-400 million MAP today, rather than closer to 1 billion.” MAP is short for monthly active people.
WATCH: Mark Zuckerberg takes witness stand on first day of antitrust trial.
-
Sports2 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports1 year agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports1 year agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike
-
Business3 years agoBank of England’s extraordinary response to government policy is almost unthinkable | Ed Conway