Leadership did not feel committed
- Neal Khosla (CEO) is splitting his time between Curai and another startup (totemic.com). Startups are hard. I don't think this is a good idea, and I think it sends the wrong message to employees and potential investors.
- Neil Hunt was rarely around, maybe 1/day per week, often less, sometimes more.
- Xavier (CTO) was focused primarily on hiring, I felt he could have been more involved on the technical decision making and direction, especially given the sizable technical debt.
Technical debt
- Curai's core offering is FirstOpinion. They acquired it around a year ago, and got no engineers from the original FirstOpinion team to do meaningful knowledge transfer. It is full of questionable python code and naive design decisions.
- No one could give me a clear picture of the overall architecture.
- I spent too much time on Devops. Simple things like scheduling/deploying a job were all configured by hand, and required some trial and error, even after I tried documenting the process.
Organizational issues
- It felt like we were missing a layer of middle managers. ICs were spending a lot of time doing project management work.
- Decisions were discussed with a consensus approach, but without managers to finalize and communicate decisions, I never felt like the direction was particularly clear.
- Eng team needed more veterans.
Business model
- I had concerns with the amount of runway and the path to profitability appearing to be a long one.
- Providing care via qualified doctors is expensive.
My last piece of advice would be to do research on the CEO and who the investors are to make sure you are getting the full picture and are OK with it.
