Pros
Tropic assembled a very senior and capable team in each department. Tropic is a challenging (in a good way), genuinely fun place to work. The company did a particularly good job of building a good fully-remote culture. My coworkers were overwhelmingly very enjoyable to chat and work with and very good at their job.
Cons
If the company is a ship, the ship never seems to be headed in the right direction. I understand that it's difficult to steer a tech company and easy to say "well that was a bad decision" with the benefit of hindsight. However, judging by the number of "pivots" Tropic has made, it seems they're stabbing in the dark more than making well researched and sound executive decisions. They've tried to make more decisions based on metrics but my read is that they're over analyzing low sample size noisy stats and still don't fully understand where the value in the app lays. I lost count of how many times the north star metric changed and couldn't tell you what it currently is. The latest layoffs were the 5th in 2 years and the 3rd where the excuse was "pivoting the AI". Is it a pivot to AI if you're laying off engineers responsible for delivering AI features? The “start up life isn’t for everyone” excuse has been exhausted as has the “pivot to AI” excuse. What will be the next excuse?