Rotting company with destructive, disengaged management
Pros
- High pay, nice office, good benefits (just did big pay cuts and stopped most benefits due to Covid-19 though so beware!!) - Few working hours a day (mostly meetings, culture of low-work and low-output generally, platform runs itself mostly) - Little expectations or awareness of your work output (managers are asked to only people-manage and are thus pretty unengaged) - Amazing gig for a middle-manager or executive if they lack the chops to perform or if you're just looking to put your feet up for a few years - Kind people who are friendly, great people+places team - I felt lucky to be at Prosper when I was there and put a lot of my life into it. However, I could not recommend a friend or family member to join Prosper in the state it is in today.
Cons
- Years of a shrinking market, deteriorating product offering, and dozens of competitors with better offerings. Prosper's product has been overpriced and worsening for years. - Prosper is 12+ years old on a Series G with no sustained profit, dwindling cash, all-time-high competition, its management is void of all-stars or even decent players, and is lending into a credit crisis. - History of lying to investors, management coverups, and SEC action: Prosper overstated its returns to 30,000+ investors for years knowingly and was fined $3M by the SEC. Most of the management responsible for this are still at Prosper and were called out for incompetence by the SEC for not knowing how to calculate investor returns despite knowing they were doing it falsely for years - "The order also finds that Prosper failed to identify and correct the error despite Prosper's knowledge that it no longer understood how annualized net returns were calculated and despite investor complaints about the calculation" - UX leadership has made most beloved UX designers walk out the door forever, dominates meetings with firehoses of unintelligible communication and no real work, seems to come in and out of reality. - You probably won't learn from your manager, and you will find it very difficult to find mentors. Prosper hasn't attracted that type of talent for a long time, and for years that quality talent has been leaving while some of the worst stay. CEO likes to say "manage more, work less" - Overpaid, disengaged executives with poor work ethic and ancient domain expertise - Board stays at arms length after years of being fed what execs call the "board narrative" - an actual separate narrative than what has actually happened in reality. I wish I was kidding. I wish I could say more. - Tech stack is described as an "atomic time bomb" with eng leadership that hasn't been technical in years and years. - Executives at all levels have no Tech experience meaning important signals (like false investor returns) fall on deaf ears resulting in years of uninformed decision-making, failed acquisitions/layoffs, regulation-breaking, failed projects, failed partnerships, coverups, and more.
