[Updated after 1 year] Still a "Mission-driven startup with brilliant people"
Pros
Given my last review was voted "most helpful", I wanted to update it after ~1 year at the company for both insiders and potential candidates to get a more transparent look at what's changed since we are a company that is going through rapid change. 1) Still engineering/data driven. This means we focus on building and investing in technology first. There is a reason why we are scaling orders of magnitudes better than big banks! Had a recent hackathon for the first time and talented folks across departments built some really things - servicing tool written in purescript, real-time chat bot, static analysis tools, etc. 2) Our social mission is very clearly the top priority and last say in decision-making. It is really easy to see the passion some of my coworkers have for making a difference in our customers' financial lives. It is personally incredibly rewarding to be working for a company that is making such a huge difference. In 2016, we saved customers an estimated $18.3m dollars (this study is available on our blog) and raised their credit scores by a significant amount. We can't save our customers that much without our business is doing well- we are able to undercut and provide better services than existing lenders, and we choose to do so 3) Transparency- It's clear to me that the executive team and management places a big emphasis on gathering feedback and listening to employees concerns. If you read some our more recent reviews, you may be concerned but Sasha and Jake have addressed and discussed every single one multiple times (will elaborate on this more in the con section) 4) Comp/benefits are getting bumped up as we get more funding! We are more at the median level now but to be more competitive hiring, we should be in the top quartile. 5) Unlimited vacation - people are skeptical of this but it's real and people take advantage of it! Most people I see take the equivalent of a week off per quarter. 6) Diversity and inclusion. The people here really care about diversity and inclusion because they are central to our mission - we are trying to bring in a (huge) group of people that is currently excluded by our financial system. This has led to redefining our company values, renaming all conference rooms after influential women/POC, formation of a Black Lives Matter book club, and employee-initiated volunteering. 7) There has been recent bad press from the CFPB ruling but if you read what the violations actually were, it is amazing we have so few and minor mistakes in such a heavily regulated and scrutinized industry (most of the violations were failure to display certain text disclosures back when LendUp was super young). Heck, even TransUnion and Equifax got slapped with a fine recently and their compliance/legal departments are probably bigger than our whole company. This is no excuse but I can say with integrity that we've never made a product decision that hurts the customer.
Cons
Focus on eng/data means other departments often get overlooked or left behind. This is a general problem in tech, not just at LendUp. Specifically, most of the recent negative reviews have been from folks leaving from our Customer Insights/Account Servicing department. This is incredibly unfortunate- as someone who has worked closely with many of them on a day to day basis I know how valuable their product expertise is. From talking to some insiders, the gist of what happened is we hired an incredibly bright, excited (and overqualified) team at low pay in exchange for career opportunity. The day to day job is mostly account servicing and handling customer calls and through this you get valuable exposure to our users and the product. I've seen many of our CI agents get promoted and moved around into different teams with paths to become data analysts or work in product. There is a LOT of career growth opportunity here but not everyone gets this same opportunity because at the end of the day we still need folks to answer calls and there are a limited number of internal positions open. The result has been high turnover on this team and a decision to outsource most of our servicing to Richmond, VA where it is much cheaper to hire. I still believe the future is bright for the company but it's unfortunate we lost some good people from CI (most left before a year) who left disgruntled and bitter at management.
