Pros
I’ve been at Spokn for more than two years and I can say with confidence that this is the best company I ever worked for. Great product and team. A lot of growth in the last year but most importantly, they care about their people in a way I've never seen before. And they do it in actions not words. I want to share two quick stories about that; before the company got funded, the budget was very tight. I wanted to take an expensive class to enhance my skills and my manager said the company would cover it. I later found out from my manager that Fawzy (co-founder/CEO) personally paid for it from his own pocket. The second story happened when the company got its first big round of funding after 3 years (seed). In appreciation to the team's loyalty when things weren't going great, Fawzy surprised all the team in Egypt by giving every single employee stock options equivalent to one year's salary. He then extended that to new hires as well. The message was if new hires in the US are getting equity then so should Egyptian ones, so we don't have 'second class employees'. For context, this is unheard of in the Egyptian startup landscape, startups in Egypt offer stock options to their executives only. There are many other things that happened during my time at Spokn but the main takeaway is the founders are always doing their best to provide the best environment for their employees to grow and also share the success with them.
Cons
For a long time, we had a very basic work-system. We weren't very structured. It worked fine when we were a very small team but when the team scaled the system didn’t. This is acknowledged by the management, though. The second thing, like in most startups, there is a lot of work to be done, and it sometimes affects work-life balance, but at least I feel appreciated.