Pros
Startup that's willing to spend capital to accomplish goals. This means we have invested in great tools and services and haven't had to cut many corners The founding team seems to have a lot of depth on the financial side The work-life balance is pretty good. Most of the exec team has little kids at home so most of them leave at a reasonable hour. It's a very small team so there's a lot of opportunity to learn. I've been on some good projects so far.
Cons
One PM left after just 2 months on the job. CTO and CMO left in the same week recently. Almost zero full-time engineers, so we're relying on tons of contractors. The main focus of the company is on sub-prime borrowers who can't find loans elsewhere. The way the product works, they're selling their house to us, and are unlikely to buy it back. So we're delaying the inevitable, and charging very high fees. Nobody talks about it openly, but it's a little bit of an icky way to make money. Founding team has no startup experience, only banking experience. One result is that the culture is bro-ish. CEO tends to deliberately pit people against one another. He also sometimes will dive into major projects at the very very end, blow everything up, and then apply pressure on the team to still ship on-time. I've seen it happen three times so far and none of those projects (all major projects) turned out well. The founding team is surprisingly unfamiliar with how to look at product, marketing, or sales in a data-driven way. They're only familiar with financial reporting which isn't as helpful in managing a business day-to-day. This means most decisions are made without data and usually based on the CEO's opinion.