Pros
The people are fantastic, especially the engineering team. People are brilliant, great at their jobs, dedicated to the mission, and also kind + supportive. Pre-COVID, there was a strong culture of hanging out with people outside of work because we really liked each other. I made a number of lasting friendships from working with this team. Stellar's mission of bringing key financial tools to those who need it most is important, and I think it has a good shot at making an important difference. It's neat to be part of an effective non-profit, working to sincerely make the world a better place. The technology is really impressive and under-appreciated. The Stellar protocol was developed by Stanford professor David Mazieres, and it solves some difficult problems in distributed systems in smart ways. The consensus algorithm is a general tool, and it could be used to accomplish a lot more than just the operations that the network supports today.
Kontras
While the Stellar protocol makes many things easy, like fast , inexpensive payments, it can also be quite difficult and unintuitive to do other things like bootstrap onto the network as a new user with fiat only. The trustlines feature of the Stellar protocol make this more difficult than it should be. In the past, SDF invested in and funded some projects built on top of the Stellar network that weren't really sustainable businesses. In my opinion, these projects were a distraction from SDF's core mission. It looks like SDF has taken a markedly different and more thoughtful approach to investments going forward, with Denelle Dixon taking the Executive Director role and running a more effective process. It remains to be seen how much fruit the new direction will bear, however.