Pros
The work itself was genuinely interesting for a few years: strong product, smart people, real autonomy to ship things that mattered. The in-house kitchen is also legitimately excellent (free breakfast, lunch and snacks made by a talented team), and honestly, that perk is probably doing more for retention than leadership realises.
Cons
The company hit its peak around the unicorn valuation and EdApp acquisition, and strategic clarity has been in decline ever since. AI arrived and caught the executive team largely unprepared. The tech stack is legacy, the response has been reactive, and VCs have moved on to AI-native companies. The result is a business under real financial pressure, making increasingly short-term decisions and framing them as strategy. Career progression is where the gap between rhetoric and reality is most visible. People consistently took on work well above their pay grade, with direct managers actively advocating for promotion. Those advocacies went nowhere. The company was extracting senior-level output at lower-level cost, with no path to recognition or advancement.