Pros
- The first 3–4 levels of the company are full of genuinely talented, ego-less people. Easy to work with, smart, collaborative. - If you're an IC or junior manager and you click with your team, the day-to-day can actually be interesting. - Made real friendships and learned a lot from peers, the kind of colleagues who make a hard job worth showing up for. - Salary comp is good. Token equity package is essentially worthless.
Cons
- The CEO regularly talks about that if you don't eat, sleep, breathe TFH, this role isn't for you — framed as a kind "exit plan" offer. The bar isn't the issue; the team works hard and goes the extra mile. The issue is hearing total-devotion rhetoric from a founder who runs another company on the side and goes dark for weeks at a time. Asking 110% of the team while you're at 50% yourself doesn't land the way he seems to think. - Mid-to-senior management is a hard wall. Big egos, thin competence, recycled excuses. - The company genuinely doesn't know how it's doing — and neither does leadership. After months you still couldn't tell anyone what the business was actually optimizing for. - "We're a startup, things are messy" gets used as a permanent shield. Reasonable framing for a 10-person team. Not reasonable when 95% of the company are startup veterans who can clearly tell the difference between productive chaos and structural avoidance. The people leaning on the excuse hadn't built one before; the people they were managing mostly had. - Relentless leadership churn. New head of X, new VP of Y, every quarter. The pattern: the CEO seemed to expect each new senior hire to solve the business for him. The competent ones bolted within months — they read the situation faster than they could be onboarded.