Pros
For me personally, DebtBook has been a breath of fresh air that I desperately needed. I worked at a large bank for the entirety of my career and was essentially a cog in the machine. I felt that my learning had plateaued and I wasn’t being challenged in my role. DebtBook challenges you both intellectually and emotionally, offering personal and professional development. At DebtBook, I've gotten the opportunity to have direct influence on strategic decisions and access to leadership. At a large firm, this wouldn't be the case until much later in my career. At DebtBook, you’re not just a number. You have the opportunity to sit on the same floor with our co-founders, our Head of Finance and our VPs of Finance & Accounting Products and Customer Success. Your contributions are recognized, and you’re judged by your deliverables and collaborative skills, both by the leadership but also by your peers. This also means you get access both to the leadership team on a daily basis and also to information they are discussing through a number of channels. I’ve never heard of a company being so open about what’s happening internally (good and bad) than DebtBook. You also get the opportunity to tackle unique, dynamic, complex problems. This gives you opportunities to try new things, or apply approaches you’re familiar with that may be new to DebtBook. We focus on delivering for our customers, which means we get to move quickly. That's not always the case at a much larger company. Overall, DebtBook is an incredible place to work. The leadership is full of kind, caring, honest, transparent, hardworking and intelligent people.
Cons
Working at a small company isn’t without it’s challenges though. Having worked for a large company with well established processes, it took me a while to get used to the environment of a start-up where things just need to get figured out. At times it means mistakes are made and things have to be corrected. This is the nature of a start-up though and should be expected. Additionally, given it’s still a start-up there is always risk associated with joining and also may mean salary expectations aren’t met or don’t line up with market rates. This is the nature of an early stage software company though and to be expected. The leadership team recognizes this and works hard to keep up with market rates but also recognizes the company needs to continue to grow to be able to increase salaries.