Pros
It could be a great automation product and if they can actually build teams to get it commercialized will benefit the NGS world. The engineering and bio teams are filled with great, smart and talented m people. Also, recent addition of our Head of Software has been great because he actually knows what he’s doing. Outside of that, limited leadership who can make decisions and inspire.
Cons
The direction of this company has really gone downhill since I joined. The CEO communicates so ineffectively with teams, only gives harsh criticism constantly and way outside of work hours. Paired with the fact he can’t make any decisions without his best friend in the company and he lies (a lot) which has made many not be able to trust him. There are absolutely no women represented in leadership, and culture and morale is consistently low. The CEO has created a toxic workplace filled with favoritism, disrespect, micromanagement and does not empower employees to do their job. On top of that, engineering timelines are so unrealistic and do not account for our current team size. We also do not pay competitively at all and veil it with “equity”, but then also don’t give out much equity to early employees. CEO also consistently brings the same person (that’s not our Co-founder) into every meeting with him because this person always agrees with him. It’s become a damaging relationship to the company as others feel they can’t voice their opinions if it differs from the two of them. We also recently had an employee resign on their own, my guess due to a lot of what is mentioned above, and the CEO held a company-wide meeting to discuss them in a negative light and spread misinformation about them as a professional and it made people feel uncomfortable about what he might do if any of us ever quit. There are limited career growth opportunities and no leveling criteria to support promotions. Lastly, hiring expectations are unreasonably high, and our CEO is the hiring manager for every single role including junior level positions. This is making organic growth unnecessarily hard for our Engineering team and we will likely struggle to hit our timelines because of it.