Pros
Workplace: - The team is open, accessible, supportive, quick to provide positive reinforcement, highly intelligent, collaborative, and fun to work with. - Leadership is exceptionally supportive and available. - Feedback is highly valued. The constant feedback loop through the company contributes to the workplace constantly improving and growing. - Team structure is very flat, with essentially two levels for the c-suite and the employees. Everyone is treated as equals. - The company is built on a meritocracy. Everyone is expected to be high functioning. Strong contributors are consistently recognized and rewarded. - Transparency is exceptional. Everyone at the company is kept aware of all relevant engineering, business, and other updates and changes. This is a product of the company's size, culture, and values. Company: - The company is in a special [and uncommon] place for a startup where it is still young, and able to offer all of the exciting opportunities of joining a startup early, but doing well enough financially to support its employees and be mindful of their needs and livelihood. - The company has demonstrated an impressive ability to deliver on previous projects and leadership has done a great job advertising these successes. This has put the company in a favorable position and paid dividends to the employees, both figuratively and literally. - As previously implied, compensation and benefits are very strong and much better than startups in similar stages. - The career opportunities are limitless, with strong encouragement for employees to get as broad of an exposure as they are comfortable with and fill any and all gaps they see. This is common to many startups but done exceptionally well here. - The company's mission and vision make it a very exciting and fun place to work. It has the potential to revolutionize the nascent private space industry, and thus alter the course of humanity, which feeds a shared enthusiasm throughout the workplace. - The company develops and delivers cutting-edge products, while constantly researching and analyzing bleeding-edge technologies. The work is a refreshing mix of agile/iterative product development and academic-style research and development.
Cons
- Common to most if not all startups, there is more work to be done than people to do it. This means that everyone has to take initiative to fill gaps where they see them and create structure where it is lacking. You should be eager to fill roles that you may not have much experience with. You also have to be comfortable with making your own structure to accomplish high-level company objectives and enforcing your own boundaries between work and personal life. Unique to a startup at this stage, leadership is highly supportive of employees having a healthy work/life balance. - Also common to startups, there is a higher risk profile here than at a more established company. Due to the favorable position of the company, this risk profile is much better than startups at similar stages. The company also has taken a slower growth profile than startups at a similar stage and has existed for over five years, demonstrating leadership's mature understanding of startup growth and giving the company a much greater likelihood of success than most.