Good early career place to see if startups are for you - Growth Edlink Employee Review

Diversity can be measured many ways, but I wouldn't say there was a lot of diversity of experience here. These were early career folks and the founders proudly admitted that they founded the company because they were "terrible employees." I'm generally skeptical of people who do startups because they resist corporate structures, because it actually takes far greater discipline to get a startup to sustainability. But I think their hearts were mostly in the right place in terms of providing a thoughtful alternative to numbing hierarchies. There was a recurring tendency for management to behave threatened when they were confronted with a differing viewpoint rooted actual experience. In more mature settings, you can have a collegial argument with no egos attached. Maybe these guys are getting there. But the lack of trust and micromanagement went to the depths of not trusting you to send an unreviewed email until a few months into the job. That seemed pretty ... corporate. This can be a pro or a con, depending on what your goal is: Edlink did not appear to have any desire to get a unicorn valuation. Which is perfectly fine. Pointless to load up a company with cash and feel pressed to spend it immediately on God knows what. You'll have a job and make rent. Your equity is not going to buy you a home in Austin. Such is life. The platform is meant to solve a problem for small edtechs that can't write their own integrations and for whom interoperability is one use case - data exchange with the student information system and learning management system. When I was there, I worried that their strongest clients would outgrow them, and clients that still need them in 18 months must be stagnating.