Pros
- Typical employee is a rare combination of humble but brilliant.
- Have highest confidence in leadership, and willingness to do bold things (on both product and things like diversity) make you proud to work there.
- Working on a huge problem (discovery)
- Benefits of a startup (ownership, lack of red tape) but few of the downsides (stable funding, excellent comp/benefits).
- Compared to any of my past companies, including Google (where I worked for 6+ years) there is a refreshing lack of politics. A combination of a) plenty of work to go around, and b) an above-average maturity, means no one empire-building. Also, and I can't emphasize this enough, the culture of humility means people really shy away from kissing-up to management or shameless self-promotion. You're rewarded for being modest and heads-down in getting your work done.
- The difference between working on a product that people love vs. one they need (Google, Uber, etc). When I've been asked where I work and say Pinterest, I've almost without exception received incredibly positive reactions. This seems like a vain motivating factor, but I think it's actually a decent litmus test for whether you're working on something worthwhile. We all spend too much time at work, so hopefully it's something that's creating real value in people's lives. With Google, people appreciated the utility and was amazed by the technology, but I seldom saw that expressed as love. Now I get lots of "I LOVE Pinterest" and some example of how it helped them with some aspiration: starting a project, organizing a trip on their bucket list, making a meal for family/friends or getting ideas for some major life moment (a growing family, getting married, turning a first house/apt into a cozy home, etc). It's hard to put a quantify the value of how that sort of regular positive feedback gives you a sense of working on something worthwhile.
Cons
- Employees are almost too nice, although after a year+ I haven't noticed it having a decidedly negative impact, leading to tolerance of low performers or lack of product execution
