Pros
Ok, there are three, and only three, that could make this worthwhile: 1. It will get you out of schools and into the EdTech sector if this is what you're looking to do. Many teammates used this as a bridge role out of schools and then into a proper company from here. 2. By and large the team is great people. She is good at making empty promises and recruiting smart and passionate people before destroying them through chaos and repeated gaslighting and lies. 3. Despite the chaos, the company is fully WFH for all roles and unlimited PTO. This was never an issue as long as you worked hard. The amount of PTO you were taking was occasionally brought up if the founder was angry at you.
Cons
There are simply too many to fully articulate, but the short of it is that the company staged a coup a few years back and removed the founder because she was inept and the staff had no faith in her ability to lead. For reasons unknown, she returned a few years ago to "save" the company and all of the same problems that forced her out the first time have returned. These include: -Financial mismanagement: There was a constant panicked sense that the money is on the verge of running out. We were often applying for new lines of credit and it was made very obvious we were making the books look good to get them. Disclaimer: I don't know if anything truly illegal was ever done. Every lost account was a 5-alarm fire that you were shamed for, despite the woeful shortcomings of the product to deliver what was promised during the sale being the main culprit for most churn. -If you were on a revenue team (sales, customer success, etc), you were promised a "comp plan" that was made of smoke. It could be changed at any time or simply wasn't honored. I never received a commission check without needling the finance person multiple times. There is no internal tool to track promised commission so keep a spreadsheet yourself. At the end of the day you can only expect to earn your base salary. Expect any comp plan to change and move the goal posts on you half-way through the cycle. -Leadership is the fundamental problem. There is no structure. The founder/CEO is EVERYONE's boss. She is a great thinker about literacy and pedagogy, but had no business ever running a business, and it shows. She is paranoid about losing her position again and thus has a hand in everything you do, and constantly shifts priorities. We would promise customers products that didn't exist yet to close a sale. The engineers are talented but are pulled in so many directions that every rollout was half-baked and full of errors. This angered long-time customers and resulted in annual churn. Everything is reactive. If you start a project, do not expect to finish it because it will be sabotaged. She will attend your big sales meetings and events, sabotaging these as well despite your well-laid plans, causing lost sales and angry customers who showed up to an event expecting one thing and getting something very different.