My analogy for Riot is that it is a rocket ship on the verge of breaking free of Earth's gravity well and going on to intergalactic success. The scary part is that we keep adding more and more people to the rocket ship, and the funny thing about rockets is that you need an exponential amount of fuel for each additional person. That means each new person needs to pull more than their own weight if we want to achieve escape velocity. The biggest challenge facing Riot is whether we can manage our growth to fully achieve our potential of going to outer space. But the worst case scenario is not horrible: we'd still be orbiting Earth, and considering how many companies blow up on the launch pad or in the low atmosphere, we will still have achieved something grand.
[+] Compensation: Despite our obvious and enormous financial success, the majority of employees, new employees especially, are not sharing in the LoL bonanza. As far as I'm aware, there are no bonuses, profit-sharing, or additional options being granted. Riot can get away with paying slightly-above average salaries for its very young staff who are just happy to work on an amazing game at an amazing company, but as its workforce matures, they will need to create a path for them to pay for their kids' college tuition and secure their retirement.
[+] Culture dilution: As a consequence of extreme growth (from forty or so employees in early 2008 to comfortably over a thousand in mid 2013), it is hard to know if we are maintaining our core cultural tenets with every hire. The good news is that it is on the forefront of every hiring managers' mind. The bad news is that sheer size makes it hard to identify people who don't actually fit our culture, and makes it hard to transfer the desired culture from existing "good" employees to new employees before another batch arrives.
[+] Maturity: In many departments, we have hired beyond the capability of the existing experienced employees to train junior employees. People are talented and full of potential, but that potential cannot be realized without reasonable oversight and mentorship.
[+] Work/life balance: Riot is not just a job, it's a lifestyle. This can be good if that's what you're looking for, but it can be bad if you differ from the norm. Part of the growing pains will be to mature into an environment that can tolerate differing levels of commitment to work hours.
[+] "Profoundly Found Elsewhere": The opposite of "Not Invented Here" syndrome. Early on, Riot had to "make do" with the people they could hire as a startup. The ones that remain were clearly ones that could "punch above their weight" when hired, and have been working on one of the most successful games in the world for years. We are now able to recruit "big names" from elsewhere in the industry, and we put a lot of effort and creativity into wooing and recruiting them. But I feel we do not have anywhere near the same respect for, or expend as much effort or creativity to keep and reward, the people we already have. This has most recently manifested in an entire layer of leadership hired in above existing employees.
[+] Inner circle: As a consequence of our rampant growth, the visiblity that upper management has of the day-to-day in the trenches and the access employees have to upper management has naturally gone down. There is now an inner circle of trusted advisors that drive the major strategic decisions of the company, and you have to be in the good graces of someone who has influence to enact high-level change at the company. Riot is still one of the most open and agile companies I've worked for, and it continues to do things to break down these barriers with smaller town-hall meetings with Marc & Brandon. But the President of the United States has a Cabinet for a reason -- he doesn't have the time to listen to every citizen armchair-expert before making key decisions. This may very well be the simple consequence of scale; but I do mourn the very flat and direct hierarchy we had when the company was much smaller.
[+] Cult of heroics: Riot values the ability of a single hero (or small team of heroes) to rise up to the challenge and excel the way out of a crisis. But just because we're good at fighting fires does not mean we should start them or ignore them when they're small. As we mature, we need to create an environment where we have heroes but no heroics -- that is, people that could step up to any emergency, but develop, plan, and work in such a way that crises do not occur.
The important thing to note here is that Riot has a deep dedication to continuous improvement. I have every confidence that we will be able to address these "Cons" as long as we stay true to our core tenets.
