Official Statement - Sammy from Polarity
Hey everyone, it's Sammy. First off, the post joking about homelessness was super distasteful, and I don't condone such behaviour. It doesn't represent my values or Polarity's.
This brought up a lot of questions I want to address. For context, as a startup, we don't have Fortune 500 budgets for marketing, advertising, and brand awareness. Boardy was the trailblazer behind this go-to-market strategy: organic growth on LinkedIn without ads by hiring content creators. That made sense for us.
My mission was simple: to not make it like every other cringy fellowship in the last few months. Through my work at Boardy, Speechify, Chatbase, and later Polarity, I saw the best and worst of these programs. The biggest flaw was that they didn't treat creators like family, and made them feel like they were just being hired. As a team of 24 young builders, we completely took over everybody's feed.
Making the fellowship feel like family meant giving the creators full trust and freedom. I told them that even though I was their boss, I would technically be working for them. For the Polarity posts, I obviously had involvement. Anything else was out of my scope, and I couldn't tell them what to post. It's out of my hands when a creator makes a post that may be controversial or conflict with my personal views. However, there is a line. That line was definitely crossed. Even personally, that post is not something I'm OK with, and I don't appreciate it at all. We've since asked the fellow to delete the post, which he did.
It sucks even more since the fellowship ends in a week, and that one person's actions reflect poorly not just on me, but on everyone else on the team, including women in tech, minority groups, Waterloo students, high schoolers, and new creators trying to grow their personal brand.
Moving forward, we still have a lot of awesome events coming up that I'd love you all to attend. Personally, I'm also moving on to focus full-time on Wealthsimple and other personal matters.
I love you all, and I love Waterloo. I've always considered myself a Waterloo student at heart. You guys are beasts, and I look up to all of you. Keep killing it.