Pros
- Easily accessible leadership. Slack is used to great effect giving transparency into leadership team debates and functional teams.
- Thoughtful responses to challenges. We won't blow up the business model or product roadmap for the sake of an edge-case sale.
- Great cross-functional collaboration. Good example set by a clearly aligned leadership team who will all tell you the same company goals.
- CEO is incredibly smart, credible, has had successful liquidity events before. Isn't afraid to get highly technical one minute and strategic the next. Kudos.
- New ideas and innovation are welcomed. Goals are organized. Business cases are scrutinized. All positives.
Cons
- Our market is crowded and has gotten more commoditized over time. This leads to a lot of feature/price war threads. Strong product marketing and coherent, audience relevant messaging are crucially required to be successful. Then, you need strong training programs in place to make sure all teams are armed as best as possible otherwise there will be a high chance of failure and turnover especially in CSM and AE roles which has historically been an issue.
- Product needs to deliver on its roadmap to stay competitive AND give us clear differentiators to win and retain clients. I have full confidence in that team but it's a very hard job when so much of your solution is dependent on publishers like Google, Apple, Facebook etc. who have a 10X+ bigger dev team than you and strategic interest in standardizing access to their platforms in order to enable as much adoption (and revenue) as possible for themselves.