Pros
1. Work life balance. work pressure is low, you are given ample time to complete your tasks. 2. Good technology team culture. Daily meetings. Frequent hackathons, thorough introduction of architecture to a new joiner. 3. Time given to grow in terms of technological skills. You are enough given time to learn and experiment with new technologies. Lots of POCs. 4. Willingness to follow best practices in tech. 5. Involvement of entire tech team for creating new products. 6. No direct control over tech team from management side. Tech is considered first class department, giving lot of control over products to developers. 7. Have hit good unit economics in US markets, with existing products. Giving them enough time to experiment around current value proposition. This is helping tech team to focus on few problems and do them well. For developers there is enough width to learn new technologies.
Cons
For All Departments: 1. You are hired as an consultant not as an employee. It gives certain tax benefits but limits other benefits and risk protection that a company employee gets. If you fall sick for over a week, that will be mentioned in your reviews and hurt your prospects. 2. Too much hierarchy for a startup. When I left, there were 6 managers managing 8 employees. Most of managerial team are friends and family. So, space for an employee to grow is limited. 3. Budget for salaries of Indian teams is maintained low. 4. Not so good legacy code that tech founders are resistant to give up on. Significant dev time is spent on fixing bugs. 5. Company seems to be earning well but the product does not have scale in terms of daily transactions. You will experience technologies in width, not depth. Not good for backend developer profiles. For Non-Tech Departments (HR, Operations, Clinical, Sales) 1. Micro management and work overhead on certain department employees. You have to mention same task on trello, slack and email. Demand for maintaining multiple records with redundant information. 2. Not trusting employees. 3. Passive aggression and occasional subtle elitism. 4. Too much interdepartmental interference. 5. Unclear processes.