Famous for setting an employee base salary of $70,000/year, Gravity Payments was perhaps not what it seemed:
But, in interviews with the Seattle Times, more than two dozen former Gravity employees said Price became obsessed with curating his compassionate persona, even if it didn’t match the person behind the viral posts. As CEO, Price cultivated a sense of fear and built a company that, as one former employee put it, was “just there to get Dan famous.”
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Gravity offered workers pay raises and opportunities to get in on Seattle’s tech boom, but, many former employees said, it came at the cost of stressful days, sleepless nights and lasting memories of working for a man six former employees described as a “manipulative” boss.
“You see the Dan in the news where he’s very charming and polished and then you’d hear these behind-the-scenes stories,” said Caitlin Palfenier, a former Gravity recruiter. “He either wants you to worship him or, if you don’t worship him, he wants you to be afraid enough to not do anything about it.”
Apparently much was an act for public consumption and the media, as is typical, bought it without skepticism.
