Pros
- The product itself had promise, coming in to Curve it was one of the only products of its kind that had the promise of being able to supply that control layer over your finances if done right. - I've had the pleasure of working with some smart and interesting folks, though I'd note for anyone considering Curve that most of these people have left or are in the process of doing so, leaving behind a largely more junior workforce. - To date I've had the chance of working with technology I've found interesting in the service of product goals that were also interesting (though not always realised as Curve's leadership pivot away from projects to react to some fire leaving things not fully realised and full of holes)
Cons
- Some may say the CEO Shachar is like marmite or some other unhelpful euphemism, but ultimately he's out of his depth. He had some great ideas but no real talent for organising a team to deliver and his chronic impatience is his undoing. He's very much a kneejerk reactor without a filter or situational and self awareness, and will frequently say or do something to undermine his own messages to people. He will frequently chew out individuals in front of an audience for minor slights and call this being "kind but not nice" when really its demoralising and damaging. He's been at times racist, sexist and bullying towards people without even realising it. - Curve struggles to retain good talent in either the Product Management space and more recently, the Tech leadership space. Nearly all PMs and Leads have left as a result of a deathmarch approach to delivery that leaves little space for thought and no space to iterate, and the increasingly toxic environment. There's good news if you come from a military background or are Israeli as this will pretty much guarantee you a position over other candidates, as the CEO is incredibly bias towards this background and has little appreciation for skill sets, believing a good soldier can pick anything up. - Despite best efforts and progress into technology like Go, Kafka, Microservices and an Event Driven approach, teams rarely feel equipped to build without accruing debt. Couple this with the constant re-orgs and there isn't the ownership present to keep the architecture from growing out organically. Attempts have been met by leadership to ways of getting teams time to do so but they are forgotten about at the first sign of an issue. Recently some Agile practices theatre was played out across teams to make all teams follow the same delivery process but it hasn't stuck or done much as it was done without analysis at a team level and lacked the follow through. - Curve really needed a series D funding round to happen but the current economic climate has delayed this resulting in mass redundancies that have been extremely poorly managed. First it was by pretending that the Netflix Keepers Principle was in play (in reality team managers were given days to highlight keepers with a set process other gut feeling and forced to meet a quota behind the scenes), then it was followed by more redundancies across entire roles as it realised it needed to do more. There's a lot of cost cutting going out across the board and ultimately if current business plans to pivot away from extreme Growth to a Revenue model don't play out almost immediately or existing investors don't put up more funds Curve won't see out the year.