Pros
+People regularly get promoted, firm has been growing. +At market comp. +Positive market reputation, good brand to have on your resume. +Colleagues on some teams are very smart and hard working. Most people try hard. +Office snacks are good and the view is amazing. Office location is great.
Kontras
The high level: -For LPs: This company is chaos inside. Strategy is nonexistent and bad behavior rules. It’s an Ellen Pao lawsuit waiting to happen. -For companies seeking funding: If you want investors who’ll replace you at the drop of a hat on your cap table, take our money. One plus is that we do invest full lifecycle (seed to IPO) and we almost always do pro rata. Onsite might help you some, but know they are constantly evaluating you and back channeling to us as your board members. -For potential hires: Expect no clear role definition, mentorship, or role pathing. Management often has unreasonable expectations you will be hard pressed to meet. Your colleagues will be at best transactional but more often than not gunning for you. If it’s worth it for the money, prestige, connections, or experience, go for it. More color: -Most dysfunctional place I have ever worked during my decades-long career. -It is a place of little kingdoms, on both the investment and platform side. There is a hierarchy, and it goes: lnvestment team, Onsite team, then internal staff - and everyone knows it. As a member of the investment team, it bothers me that colleagues are often condescending and rude to the Onsite and admin teams. -The IC consistently overrules red flags discovered in diligence based on their personal whims and hunches. -There is incredible backstabbing, competition, and cutthroat behavior. I have never heard so many people tell me they have cried at work. Conflict is aggressive and happens often. People throw each other under the bus behind the scenes. -Internal operations are a complete mess. The team of assistants is poorly run with no best practices, internal policies are so vague they are a joke, and the systems the company runs on are dinosaurs. It seems we follow little of the best practice advice that we give our portcos. -Benefits are not best in class. 401k match is only awarded after three years of tenure, parental leave for men is pitiful, and some benefits have complicated rules like the meal stipend program. -People are online 24/7. You are expected to be responsive nights, and during vacation and paternity leave. I have never seen so many people working while sick with Covid. The norms are unhealthy and contribute to burnout. Whatever time zone you live in, expect to work ET hours. I routinely see colleagues online in meetings at 6am or 9pm their time. -Titles are totally inflated and everyone is obsessed with where they sit on the status hierarchy. -Basically no support resources for women, people of color, disabled employees, and so on. -Low bars for performance - people get away with a lot here that I have never seen fly at other companies. For example, directly lying to colleagues, electing to just not do work that's been promised, poor communication, no showing meetings with no explanation... -At the end of the day, all this company cares about is whether we make money. We constantly talk about RIFs and firing CEOs as if it's no big deal and there aren’t humans involved. It’s all about the numbers.