An amazing experience to be a part of
Pros
A couple of years ago, I was approached with an offer to leave behind a comfortable, secure, intellectually fulfilling role within a mid-sized company (that by the way, I absolutely adored working with) for a brand new adventure at Carvana. My interest was piqued for several reasons - the aspirational direction of the company was exciting, the number of business and process problems requiring a technical solution were both interesting and plentiful, everyone that I spoke with was both intelligent and committed, and the potential of the company to succeed at the time was, not absent risk, but definitely trending in the right direction. After some soul searching and several deep discussions with key members of the team I chose to seize the opportunity. My first month on the job was happy chaos as I settled in. By the second month I realized that I was a part of something special...something even more unique and exceptional than I'd initially realized. The concepts of transparency, fairness, doing the right thing (even/especially when it was the harder choice), providing top-tier quality (in both product deliverables and service execution) and always looking for ways to improve have proven infectious and are glaringly apparent in both our product offering and throughout our culture. Any company inherits the values of it's leadership and these foundational attributes, as well as tenacity, courage, patience and thoughtfulness, are blatantly reinforced by the actions and decisions made by our CEO every day. Led by example, it becomes easy and common to embrace a core value system that chooses to do good - good on behalf of our customers, good on behalf of our employees, good on behalf of our peers and good on behalf of our communities. Walking around Carvana you see this shine through every day. People smile...a lot. People are happy. People are inspired, connected, fulfilled and productive.
Cons
This company is taking what has, historically, been an unpleasant process for most American's and making it a positive one - a convenient shopping and comparison experience, high quality product, great service, and big savings - all wrapped up in one convenient site. We must be onto something because we're experiencing absolutely explosive growth in pretty much every area of the company. It is both rare and humbling to be a part of a startup that experiences this level of success so quickly, let alone one headquartered in Phoenix. Unfortunately, the negative impact of fast growth can sometimes be felt here as well - we've outgrown our office space (twice), we have to hire and onboard people more quickly than most companies would be comfortable with, we continually experiment with and correct our processes, systems and organizational structures. Sometimes we experience psychological growing pains as well - finding ways to keep the energy, devotion and soul that are representative of our startup roots, while taking our place as a multi-billion dollar enterprise is not only extremely difficult, it takes care and patience. It takes resolve, flexibility, perseverance and determination by every employee in the organization - that's a lot to ask of leadership from any organization. Fortunately, Carvana seems to be up to the task. I find that as an organization, we seem to win a lot more than we lose. For those possessing adequate plasticity of mind and temperament, the pros appear to heavily outweigh the cons.