Good startup to work for - Sales Edlink Employee Review

Working at Edlink has been a great experience. There’s a high level of accountability here in the work you do as a team. You’re trusted with real responsibilities like clients or business decisions, and if you do good work, people notice. The team is full of smart and thoughtful people with different perspectives, and it’s cool to be around folks who actually are curious. There’s also a lot of room to build valuable skills as the company has continued to grow. Something that has been consistent in my time here is you get more coaching and honest feedback than most places, and you’re actually allowed to fail and learn from it which is rare compared to other companies that say they do this (they do not). If you want to understand the real inner workings of a startup and stretch yourself, this is a great place to do it.

Not really a con, but you unlearn bad habits fast. Feedback is direct, and it can sting if you’re not used to it. But over time, you learn to take it as motivation, not criticism. It’s not for everyone, but it helps you grow.

Disclaimer: I'm a 20-year startup vet. If you're just getting started, take some of this with a grain of salt. People generally brought the best, most creative, collaborative versions of themselves to work every day. They genuinely seemed to enjoy each other personally and working together. They took a lot of pride in delighting clients. The product solves a fundamental pain that their edtech clients would rather not bother with.

Diversity can be measured many ways, but I wouldn't say there was a lot of diversity of experience here. These were early career folks and the founders proudly admitted that they founded the company because they were "terrible employees." I'm generally skeptical of people who do startups because they resist corporate structures, because it actually takes far greater discipline to get a startup to sustainability. But I think their hearts were mostly in the right place in terms of providing a thoughtful alternative to numbing hierarchies. There was a recurring tendency for management to behave threatened when they were confronted with a differing viewpoint rooted actual experience. In more mature settings, you can have a collegial argument with no egos attached. Maybe these guys are getting there. But the lack of trust and micromanagement went to the depths of not trusting you to send an unreviewed email until a few months into the job. That seemed pretty ... corporate. This can be a pro or a con, depending on what your goal is: Edlink did not appear to have any desire to get a unicorn valuation. Which is perfectly fine. Pointless to load up a company with cash and feel pressed to spend it immediately on God knows what. You'll have a job and make rent. Your equity is not going to buy you a home in Austin. Such is life. The platform is meant to solve a problem for small edtechs that can't write their own integrations and for whom interoperability is one use case - data exchange with the student information system and learning management system. When I was there, I worried that their strongest clients would outgrow them, and clients that still need them in 18 months must be stagnating.