Pros
I enjoyed the culture of BlueVine. Everyone was open and willing to explain what they were working on. Execs are approachable. There are a lot of smart people here that I've learned a lot from. People are pretty laid back and the company doesn't have the attitude of larger overworked finance companies. The work that I did was interesting and challenging. The location is very close to Caltrain in Redwood City (and we they give free Go Passes). This is convenient for commuting from SF. They've made some strong hires on the exec team in the past 6 months (for HR and Product) who will hopefully make some much needed changes.
Cons
Compensation and benefits are not competitive. Not even comparable other startups let alone big tech companies. Women are underrepresented in management positions and promotions from the rep level to management nearly always go to men. Women are more likely to get half promotions to "team lead" or "senior rep". Our CTO is cautious to a fault and it holds back our technical progress. Also, him being located in Israel while the Product team is in the US makes everything take longer. During my time at BV, HR has been really inconsistent with its policies without regard to how this affects peoples careers. This year they created a rule that promotions can now only happen once a year in December except for "special exceptions" aka people who threaten to quit. BlueVine policies tend to favor the loudest/pushiest men and they are very weak at identifying talent in people who aren't constantly yelling about how talented they are. There’s a team of 20+ people that has never hired even one women. I don't understand why HR doesn’t speak to them about this. Certain members of senior management are given a long leash even if they have inappropriate anger outbursts during work, they seemingly face no consequences. BlueVine is not good at cutting out low performers. There's a lot of dead weight on some teams but only once in a blue moon will someone actually be fired and even those seem to be more political than performance based.