Pros
- Mission: I always know I’m making a difference and am part of something important to people’s lives. (My other “best job ever” was teaching at a large University; I consider this comparably rewarding, but with better pay.)
- CEO: I came to Color in large part because after discussions with Othman Laraki, I knew “yeah, this is the kind of straight-up guy I want to work for”.
- People: We hire people who don’t need to be "managed". Sure, we need a few folks to herd the cats and keep us all marching in the same direction, but SOP is that you’re given a goal and resources and expected to figure it out and get it done without managers looking over your shoulder.
- People: Our talent pool is deep and wide. Obviously no one person knows everything, but you can always find somebody who can help you with what you need to know, and we learn a lot from each other.
- People: (Yes, I listed “people” three times — it’s that important.) Everybody at Color knows we’re all on the same team. Cooperation runs rampant here.
- Quality: There are always trade-offs to make, but as a bio-tech firm we never forget that patients make major life-altering decisions based on our work, so we focus on getting it *right* a lot harder than many other companies.
- Balance: We work hard, sometimes very hard, but unlike many SV start-ups a lot of us have families and we get to go home and remember what our spouses and kids look like.
- We’re still a pre-IPO start-up: Excitement, disrupting the status quo, a shot at financial rewards, a chance to make a difference in the early days of a company and grow with it, i.e. all the usual attractions of a start-up.
Cons
- Burlingame isn’t exactly the most exciting place in Silicon Valley, and most employees have to commute. However, Burlingame does have good access to public transit (BART, CalTrain), so we draw talent from all over the Bay Area.
- The open-space work area can get distracting, but there’s always headphones+music.
