Pros
I was on comparatively smaller team (Product), so my experience is not necessarily indicative of the majority of roles within PitchBook (i.e. sales, research, account management, etc.), but I feel confident about the following: PitchBook is a great place for young professionals. Working here will give you exposure to just about every side of the SaaS B2B industry. People get promoted quickly and fairly, and more recently they’ve put in place established career paths for Sales, Research and Account Management. Furthermore, PitchBook gives employees ample opportunity to move departments according to their interests. All of this amounts to being an incredibly useful experience for people who are fresh in their career and want exposure to a variety job functions. It’s like boot camp for your career; you’re going to learn a ton and feel very well equipped on your path. PitchBook is what you make it––literally. Along with the internal mobility, employees have the opportunity to create their own roles. There were numerous instances of employees encountering roadblocks/suboptimal processes, proposing solutions and essentially getting hired to execute on that proposal. PitchBook has great people. Everyone is very nice and open; PitchBook has a very team-oriented and collegially competitive atmosphere. People work very hard, but you’ll also have many happy hours and company/team events. Some of the smartest and most capable people I know I met at PitchBook, and I’m confident that it’s a breeding ground for strong future talent. As a designer, I appreciated the opportunity to work on an extremely complex platform. From a user interface and visual design perspective, my time at PitchBook provided many opportunities for tackling design challenges such as organizing an immense amount of data, creating a usable interface and navigational structure, designing useful rather than "just pretty" data visualizations, and the constant tug of war between what functionality to show vs. what to hide (discoverability). As a disclaimer, everyone should know that succeeding at PitchBook requires having an interest in learning about the Private Equity, Venture Capital and M&A space. PitchBook is an extremely sophisticated product in an extremely complex niche. It's impossible to do your job well without understanding the unique needs of this space and the people that operate within it. Luckily, PitchBook has one of the finest employee training/knowledge development programs I've ever encountered. It's a rarity to find such a well-developed program in a tech company of its size/age.
Cons
PitchBook is one of the fastest growing companies in Seattle, and it has even shown up on similar national rankings. As such, it’s no surprise that it’s biggest challenge is one of scale. A process/unit of infrastructure that works for a startup likely does not work for a globally distributed company. Practically speaking, this means that communication between departments/teams can be difficult. Furthermore, a more robust middle-management structure is needed to mitigate these challenges and better distribute decision making authority throughout the company. Better understanding who can make decisions and empowering more middle and lower-level employees to do so still remains a challenge. From a design perspective, I think PitchBook needs to improve in the areas of user data gathering and testing both during and after product launches, and making data-driven decisions in general. I know senior management is aware of this need for improvement and at least have the intent of addressing it moving forward.
