Pros
Was a great culture, fun atmosphere, and a real 'roll up your sleeves and dig in' spirit for years while we were a start-up. Gail Goodman, our CEO then was a phenomenal and inspirational leader. I was able to grow into numerous roles along with the company. We ultimately went public successfully, which was a tremendous experience.
Cons
Along the way the products expanded in scope to the extent that it seemed like we were trying too hard to be everything every customer asked us to do, to the extent that products suffered and fell behind some of the competition. For awhile before that, we had a great email marketing platform that was our core product offering, then we began adding too many features which made the UI more complex than many customers wanted. Became harder to support, buggier, and harder to use. We probably would have done better to focus more on the Email Marketing and related things. When we tried to give it something along the lines of CRM functionality we were listening to customers who wanted those things, but we perhaps would have done better to maintain the original focus, and directed more into rebuilding our email marketing product to keep up with the competition. When it was announced last November with glee by the execs that the company was being sold, there was a battle cry of business as usual out to all of us. Naturally however there was a pall over the workforce in the office for the ensuing months, and you could cut the tension with a knife on any given day. About January, the former CFO, then taking over as the 'business manager' under the new company announced awkwardly in the company meeting that there would be some 'affected units' when the sale goes through, and of course that made the worry an tension worse, but this is how things can play out in the corporate world sometimes. Mid-Feb of this year, the sale went through and immediately there was a reorganization with a number of layoffs, announced as about 15% of the company.