Bitwise ex-employee: Co-CEO got tattoos with workers, but ‘left a permanent scar’ on Fresno

The most face time I ever got with Irma Olguin Jr. was at a tattoo shop in downtown Fresno.

It was April 2022, and I was working on a blog to promote one of Bitwise Industries’ startup apps, Tatstat. As the brand and content manager for the Ventures division, I knew it would make for a great story: Our chill, pink-and-purple-haired CEO gets a matching tattoo with one of my effortlessly cool co-workers.

Irma looked right at home in the artist’s chair. That’s because matching tattoos with Bitwise employees was her thing. If you asked her, she would do it — usually without knowing what the artwork would be. At the time, more than two dozen employees shared a tattoo with her.

As a recent hire (and tattoo virgin), I was fascinated by this display of vulnerability uncharacteristic of typical startup CEOs: both in walking blindly into a tattoo appointment, and in positioning herself as an equal among her employees.

In less than a couple of hours, the duo was inked, honoring the bond between not just a boss and staff member, but friends.

“Can I give you a hug?” Irma asked me before she left.

I’m not a hugger, but I felt compelled to open up my arms, and we briefly embraced in the tattoo shop. Just over a year later, Irma spoke to me for the last time in an emergency 8 p.m. Memorial Day meeting, as she and co-CEO Jake Soberal suddenly furloughed all 900 Bitwise employees, even the ones with matching tattoos.

I listened in shock as the CEOs — who reassured me just weeks before that I didn’t have to worry about the financial stability of the company — confirmed that my last check likely would not clear. It was unbelievable.

In the fallout of one of the Central Valley’s biggest stories in decades, two camps emerge: skeptics and true believers. Those who always wondered, “What did Bitwise even do?” and those who fiercely believed in the company’s professed mission — ”We build tech economies in underestimated cities” — continue to be at odds.

I was a skeptic for Bitwise’s first eight years of life. I used to drive downtown and wondered whether they were all about coding or selling co-working space. But as more blighted buildings became Bitwise locations — ”castles for the underdogs,” the CEOs called them — and friends remarked how incredible the culture was, I became intrigued. I joined the team in 2021. And soon, I believed.

I believed it was possible to create a successful tech company in Fresno.

Most of all, I believed I had found a company that truly cared for its people. In 2022, Bitwise formed a wellness team and hosted weekly virtual meetings for employees to share how they were feeling. And the company instituted every other Friday off to prevent burnout.

So how could the CEOs of a company that promoted a culture of inclusivity, that believed “rest isn’t earned, it’s necessary,” that built castles for underdogs, instantly destroy the lives of those it claimed to serve?

I sometimes imagine knocking on Irma’s and Jake’s doors to ask them for answers. Because this wasn’t your average layoff, another story of a failed startup. The company continued to hire good people right up until the week before the furlough.

And when those castle walls came tumbling down — walls I soon discovered never really belonged to Bitwise — what remains are the people. And the amazing people in these underserved communities deserve answers, too.

For every tweet proposing to pitch this tragedy as a Netflix docuseries, I’m reminded of how our losses feel limitless. Lost wages. Lost health coverage. Lost 401k contributions — and not just the “matching” monies, but our own hard-earned cash we trusted to be diverted from our paychecks to our retirement accounts.

The betrayal is brutal, not just as a former employee, but as a forever Fresnan. Now that the tule fog of my furlough has lifted and I’m officially terminated, I see the rainbow-colored Hive in my rearview mirror, the harsh reality exposed. Stories that bluntly lay out the move to paper checks and the unpaid property taxes, and thin explanations from leadership. Who would ever believe these excuses? I did.

So did many others.

In an interview for The Information, Bitwise investor Freada Kapor said, “The picture of Jake and Irma that is emerging now… bears no resemblance to how they have presented themselves to me and to others for many, many years.”

That new picture has broken our hearts. Yet our spirit endures. It’s evident in job fairs and pop-up headshot events.

Yet the long-term reality is that one venture capitalist’s lesson learned is someone else’s eviction notice. Maybe to some investors, startup funding is monopoly money. But it’s real to the underdogs who can’t make rent.

Before I left the tattoo shop last April, Irma and the artist asked if I’d ever consider getting a tattoo. I wanted to believe that maybe someday, I could sit in that chair, side by side with my CEO.

I hesitated. “My mom would kill me,” I said.

I wonder now, if I were a person who collected tattoos, if I would’ve gotten a matching tattoo with a CEO who furloughed 900 dedicated employees over Google Meet with no apology. A CEO who sat beside another CEO, who cited “unforeseeable circumstances” and walked away with the click of a button.

A CEO who left a permanent scar on the community that needed her the most.

This story was originally published June 21, 2023 at 12:13 PM.