Pros
I have been here for almost six months now and am slowly starting to see the positive benefits of all of the changes that my teams and I have been diligently working toward. Being totally candid, when I arrived, this company was in disarray and was carrying a lot of baggage. This company was bootstrapped and grew extremely fast without any organizational planning, which led to a number of the issues that have been expressed in other reviews on this site. I was hired to address most of these issues and to help the company mature; however, this will not happen overnight. We have recently been able to hire some extremely strong leaders across multiple teams in the company whom all share a goal of making this a truly great company. I am very excited to work with them to help make that happen. Not relying on outside funding allows us to focus on running the company and not chasing the next round of funding from VCs. This also allows us to stay true to our company’s mission and not bow to investor pressure, which could force us to compromise. I have never met people as committed to a company as I have seen here. Of course working with an unobstructed view of The SF Bay everyday is nice. In over 20 years of working in tech companies, this company has the best Work/Life balance I have ever experienced. As frustrating as it can be at times, I really like coming to work and enjoy working with my teams here.
Cons
I wish that I and other people in the company could make positive changes faster. New employees that have recently started have the benefit of experiencing these improvements from the start, but existing employees have had to have patience during this transition period, which can lead to frustration. We need to fill additional open leadership positions ASAP so that affected employees can get better direction and guidance sooner. It appears that I have not yet been as successful as I had hoped in improving transparency and communication to the company as has become clear by a large number of extremely negative reviews recently on this site. I had hoped that more people would feel comfortable directly coming to me and HR with issues so that we could address them, but that has not happened. Gaining trust from all the employees is going to be a top priority until that is addressed. Having a senior management team that is geographically dispersed adds to the complexity Managing multiple development teams across multiple time-zones also adds complexity We currently need additional talented people to make this company successful. Hiring is our number one priority, but it is very challenging – especially with the current state of our reviews on this site. Being short-handed puts pressure on a few people in the company, which can lead to burn-out.
