Pros
Impactful product making a real difference in our customer's lives.
We've done a great job of hiring passionate, smart, mission driven people. This is the main reason why I have stayed for so long - this is the best group of people I've ever worked with.
Great work life balance for a start up.
Technically strong and collaborative engineering team.
Cons
CEO makes a lot of women feel uncomfortable. We have a significant problem in trying to retain female employees. The majority of people who have quit over the past two years were because of him. Ironically he is currently our main HR person so there's really no avenue free from retaliation to address people issues/grievances.
Management doesn't care about people, only what we can churn out - this is strongly felt throughout the company based on our engagement survey. If someone is underperforming or not engaged, it's solely their fault vs other external factors such as dealing with personal issues, or having their project shut down after multiple quarters of effort, constant product pivots, being given work they were not hired to do, or given very little support to do their job properly.
We have an awful top down performance review process where all the execs get in a room and judge each individual one by one. No 360 reviews. We get judged on how much we adhere to our company values (collaboration, humility, empathy, feedback) even though our CEO is the antithesis of these.
We raised our series B but we're barely growing. It's mostly just to extend our runway while we figure out how to build a real business.