Pros
- I found that remote-first worked very well at Cervest. - Most people I worked directly with were very nice, respectful, and incredibly competent/impressive - As Cervest hired some great climate scientists, statisticians, and engineers, it was a great place to learn about these things. You could find an expert on pretty much anything you could think of within these fields! - The teams I was on had great work-life balance, but I heard that this wasn’t the case in other teams - Great mission (climate change adaptation)
Cons
I agree with all the points raised in a recent review titled "Great aims, but struggling to achieve them" from the 10th September 2022. In my opinion that review is a very clear summary of the situation at Cervest when I left. To re-iterate some of these point and to add some further points: - Lack of focus: having big goals is great, but to achieve them you have to start with a product with a small scope, get feedback on it from customers/users, and iterate quickly. Then you can then increase the scope to reach the big goal. Cervest was trying to skip the customer/user feedback aspect, and approximate what the big finished product would be. - Customer/user feedback: There was technically a mechanism for user feedback at Cervest, but in practice this didn’t really reach the product teams. If feedback did find its way to product teams, it would take a long time and the feedback was distorted/simplified along the way. As a result, the product teams were ordered to build the features that were in the “vision” of leadership/management. Furthermore, the product teams were blocked from actually talking to users, and the justification was along the lines of “don’t worry about the users, they don’t know what they want anyways”. - Leadership had little experience in climate science and building tech products. This explains the “rookie mistake” of not being interested in user feedback (which is a classic way for startups to fail). - Despite the explicit goal of Cervest being to help the world adapt to climate change, my impression was that the actual objective was to build a product that looks useful in order to raise the valuation of the company. Given this objective, not being interested in user feedback and whether the product solves a problem makes more sense. But note that this is simply my conjecture; it can be hard to extract what the “real” objectives are when actions (not caring about solving customer problems) don’t fit words (claiming to want to solve customer problems). - There were many teams within the company, and these clustered naturally into groups that didn’t really interact. My impression was that while the product/science teams were becoming very aware of these problems (lack of focus, a product that doesn’t actually solve a real problem etc..), the engineering (ie: web dev side) were not necessarily aware of this (but note that this is only my impression; I was on the product/science side and so didn’t interact with the web dev teams). - Some aspects in management were becoming deeply problematic and growing in power within the company: drive-by management, refusing to learn from mistakes, playing political games, talking over others etc. This was causing a real issue with moral and general trust by the time I left. In summary, this is the classic startup story of trying to build an impressive-looking product that seems like it solves a problem, but actually doesn’t. So a great learning experience for me! On the whole I don’t regret my time there at all, as I worked with some truly impressive people and learnt a lot. However when I left Cervest the mood was turning pretty sour (as a result of all these points above) so I wouldn’t recommend joining.