The Cons are: a) growing pains; b) silos; c) Silicon Valley.
Growing Pains. The number of employees has increased about 10 fold in the 2+ years I've been here and that inevitably causes two kinds of problems: 1) mismatch between headcount and workload; 2) operational errors. On Operations, the growth from a tiny startup to about 500 employees has had many fluctuations (so many different software packages!), but the place keeps adapting and is running so smoothly now. The Operations folks have pulled it off. .... As for workload mismatch, it surely varies in different micro-environments, but I sense that, generally across the organization, there are far more people underworked than overworked. That can be really dissatisfying. Managers should be held to a higher bar before being given more staff. The most overworked group seems to be Recruiting. That's a bad sign.
Silos. The Tech sides are different from the Philanthropy sides, and the three Philanthropy arms have very different specific aims while all focused on increasing opportunity. Many of us hunger to know more about each other's work. Priscilla and Mark do their part with their monthly town halls and Communications does its part with the extensive website, but all that is kind of cheerleading/PR stuff. We seek deeper peer-to-peer communication across CZI sections.
Silicon Valley. It's a great place for the Tech side because of the local concentration of software developers, but can there be a place worse than Silicon Valley for a philanthropy whose central concern is economic mobility? You're just not close to the problem here and this can lead to naivete. Wage stagnation, lack of opportunity, poverty -- an understanding of this is pretty shallow if it comes just from a freshman sociology class. Moreover, many who are fully committed to the mission may feel frustrated by those for whom this is just another stop on a Silicon Valley career path.
