Pros
- Startup/scale-up with a diverse set of clients using the products at scale, rather than just a startup with a nice/untested idea; - One of the most transparent startups (from what I have seen) in terms of financials, runway and overall health of the business - Small tech team with experienced engineers where one can really contribute significant pieces of work and show the contributions publicly (source-available & open-source products); - Good possibility to have initiatives and propose ideas across the business, although execution often constrained by capacity/resources; People across the company do genuinely listen and have good intentions.
Cons
Main reason for writing this is seeing some of the other comments, and wanting to express a more nuanced/realistic view. Some existing opinions I believe are extremely unfair and diminish the extraordinary sustained effort, research and achievements from the tech / data-science side. Expect a typical start-up environment where one needs to adjust strategy, roadmap and priorities often, in response to changes in an extremely dynamic environment (ML/AI). The way I see it, the transition from start-up phase to scale-up phase has been bumpy, which meant the business made a choice of being more focused; Some teams were made redundant / and more people left as a result of changes in strategy and overall dissatisfaction in the business taking less risk and introducing additional complexities in the development process (movement to scrum, transition to no longer develop everything in the open-source repositories). It's unclear to me how much of this was driven by investors / VC funding constraints. In my view, mistakes have been made, especially in not seeking Tech input before critical decisions. Communication between Tech and Product teams has suffered in the past, compounding the overall employee dissatisfaction. However, the new CTO has significantly improved things in this area, and has a solid grasp on both the business and tech side of things. This is why my overall outlook is a positive one. As long as one is realistic in their expectations when joining a VC-funded startup, they would probably have a better experience in Seldon than in most other startups at a similar stage of growth.