Pros
I have over 25 years working in software, I have successfully participated in 3 startup companies that grew from 0 to over $35M in revenue and I was also the CTO of a growth company accelerator mentoring over 50 growth companies in Toronto. As a result, I believe I can establish which companies that are truly impacting their market through technology advancement. I always encourage any readers to carefully consider the veracity of posts from anonymous former employees. If anyone is interested in what is happening today, I strongly recommend you take the effort to ask real people who work here. Product and Revenue One of the main reasons I decided to join the company was based on the strength of the product and revenue opportunities. In the enterprise space, we always dream of closing a top 5 company in their space and then get the software deployed into production. This company has one of the top 5 airlines in the world as a customer and has been successfully running in production for over 4 years. Even better, this customer is willing to be a reference to other airlines. Based on this, you know the software is unique, disruptive to the space, and it works at scale. This success has already been leveraged to score a handful of smaller but high profile customers. The beauty of the product space is that the same platform is being used to create a whole suite of applications that are being sold to existing customers. The corporate challenge is to scale out the company's ability to build new products, deploy, and support more customers efficiently, and that is exactly what we are currently doing. Historically, product management has been less mature than the engineering function -- not uncommon in early stage enterprise software companies -- and we are growing out that function very aggressively in the coming months. People We have a great team of people here that enjoy working together and who have embraced the task of tackling huge issues facing the airline industry. The environment is co-operative, fast paced, and our people take real pride in the fact that we have a set of products that are distinctive, innovative, scalable, and embraced by our customers. In short, the people who are here really like it here and they love the airline industry. CEO The CEO was also one of my key decision points for joining the company. I have never seen a successful startup company where the CEO didn't have a strong ego and sense of direction. In my experience, it's a basic job requirement. My experience with the CEO has exceeded my expectations. He has listened to all of the feedback from his team, and he has remained laser focused on the most important things despite having tons of ideas for future revenue. This is a rarity in my experience. Summary In my time here, I have been able to focus the engineering and product teams on building a foundation for future growth while expanding our footprint to new customers. I have the full support of the CEO and he is steadily growing out the executive team with people who have a history of success. We are rapidly growing our team, the product, our customers, and our sales activities. I have seen a lot of startup and growth companies in my career and if you are considering a career in a growth company that has a real product and real revenue, this is one of the best opportunities around in Toronto and Montreal.
Kontras
Moving from startup into growth is one of the most difficult phases of small companies. It is very easy to continue with ad-hoc practices that existed in the startup phase and it is also common to see an attempt to implement large company policies which can be equally ineffective. When I first joined, there were examples of both of these situations which is not unusual for growth companies. In the past 6 months we have addressed the bulk of them. While we will certainly face issues you typically find in fast growth companies, this is an extremely exciting time here. I am confident that the CEO and our executive team will address any new issues in a timely manner as the company continues to excel with our products and customers. Thoughts on Stealth I have worked for start-ups and fortune 500 companies in my career and I know that large companies will employ any tactic (ethical or not) to destroy any potential competition. As a disruptive company in a very competitive industry, it makes a lot of sense to remain stealthy. This has been raised as a concern by employees, however, I have yet to see it materially affect our ability to execute. It has not affected recruiting, it has not affected individual employee career growth, and it certainly hasn't affected our ability to build world class software or attract and acquire world class customers.