Pros
Our products are genuinely great and we've achieved a clear product-market fit within the enterprise IT space. This takes a lot of the guesswork out of our go-to-market functions as we have a super well-defined ideal customer profile and the main job becomes getting a seat in the right evaluations. Our customers love us. No, really - they tell me all the time. I've lost count of how many customers have told me directly some variation of "this is the best vendor partnership we've ever had" or "we use HAProxy as an example internally of what makes a great vendor relationship." We don't take this for granted and the team works tirelessly to maintain this. Beyond the product, the people truly make HAProxy exceptional. Our engineering, technical, and product teams are world-class. They help set the bar for the whole GTM organization and have us all striving for excellence. HAProxy is private, owner-operated and fully bootstrapped. I didn't fully appreciate this element until joining, having come from the VC-backed (and ultimately PE-acquired) world. There's no external 3rd party pressuring the business to do anything that deviates from our mission. We only work for our customers and we have a product vision we're executing against (often in collaboration with our most strategic customers). This is rare and makes a huge difference culturally.
Cons
While we've matured in many areas of the business as we've scaled, we still run like a startup in some areas and have a horizontal structure in most departments. This can be good and bad, as it can be easy to move fast and be autonomous, but sometimes you can find yourself stretched across many different areas. We are growing fast, but we need to continue accelerating hiring for key roles and developing processes that will scale.