Pros
The working class of the company is composed of quality, high performing, professional people who care greatly about the mission. All they want is to do a great job and have their ideas on how to improve the company and the product to be heard. The Tech Bro keg party culture doesn't exist here, and no one misses that culture. It is truly one of the most professional startups I've ever encountered.
Cons
In fairness to the CEO, he's charismatic and has a mission that is worth getting behind. Unfortunately, he's a great salesman but not a leader. The team rallies behind the mission and behind each other, but operates in fear of the CEO and their next interaction. Most of the middle class actively avoids interacting with him for fear of being demeaned or yelled at. The CEO presents as a conservative man of faith. To be clear, no one has a problem with his faith. In fact, there are a wide variety of faiths within the company and a great deal of variance on political views and orientations. Unfortunately, when you lead with your faith and your politics on your sleeve, and you haven't already built trust and found common ground with people who may not share the same religious and/or political views, it is immediately divisive and connecting with those people becomes significantly harder. There is a lot of rhetoric from the CEO about faith and how much he cares about the staff, but his actions for the most part do not back up that rhetoric. There’s little attempt to empathize with the staff whose experiences and social classes are very different from his own, or to truly understand and connect with the team. Being vulnerable and showing humility when things go sideways would go a long way to gain the trust of the staff. For all the talk of innovation, the only ideas that count are the CEO's or those from his inner circle. This is truly unfortunate because both the old and new directions have potential. The old direction failed because of antiquated sales strategies and marketing strategies that were questionable at best. The Product team had great ideas on how to make the product better for all users, but were unable to get buy in. One of the positive reviews talked about letting go of malcontents. There are no such people here. Yes, there are frustrated people on staff but they are frustrated by how they are treated by the CEO, not because of some acquisition (which happened years ago.) People have stayed for as long as they have because they truly cared about the users and the mission, giving much more of themselves than they probably should have. If they were truly the wrong people, allowing them to stay on staff for years is a failure of management / leadership, since good leaders will identify and take action to remove the poison immediately.
