Amateur leadership, evolved to become a legit business
Pros
Great innovation around containerization, kubernetes, docker, CI/CD and ability to show off the product at huge tradeshows like KubeCon. Community engagement with developer relations was very well-done from the beginning with fantastic content, great outbound content (podcast/video/events). Passion by the original 10-15 employees to provide a CI/CD solution that is proprietary while playing very nicely with open source communities of CNCF, HELM, Git, JMeter, etc.
Cons
Initial leadership team of CEO, CTO, CMO, CRO were not very good at management, engaging employees to build a great employee experience was severely lacking and a high-turnover existed until the CTO and CRO were replaced and Microsoft (M12) was able to push for senior executives (from Google) to join. The first set of employees had to fight for benefits, their stock options, basic things that simply should have been taken care of properly and it was an amateur business operation the first few years of it's existence, in 2022 is started making major shifts and now seems to be on track. It took way too many years to be enterprise-ready for enterprise companies, too many missing key features, too many workarounds and custom-steps in the technology stack were needed and too many customers churned and too many deals were lost. Again, this seems to have shifted drastically in 2022, especially now in 2023 and they are off to the races.
