Vantaggi
I started here as a consultant, drawn by Scott’s name. I studied at NYU Stern and couldn’t get into his course. So I applied for a consultant role to get the tenets of his course content but delivered in the workplace. I really enjoyed it and embraced the opportunity, really reveling in my responsibilities and trying to help ease logistical burdens where I could. After a few months, the leadership team reached out to see if I was interested in joining full-time and here we are. For context, I've transitioned my career a couple of times and have worked for very large, multi-national organizations. The mix of social impact, business-alignment, and team culture was never completely right. Section4 manages to balance all of these successfully. - All team members here are smart, engaged, and self-sufficient. They have a craft and have honed it well. People care about their work and are driven to contribute. - Individual contributions matter and go visibly towards final company deliverables. Aside for a few tweaks from fellow staff, your work is not watered down or held up in "buy-in" processes. You can see your impact in our work/strategy and you are recognized for it. I’m also empowered to come up with solutions to my own problems. “Just run with it” is a saying that comes to mind. - It’s very entrepreneurial and fast-paced. Ideas are welcomed. The projects I’ve worked on have mostly been all new things to the organization (or something that didn’t get attention due to bandwidth). If you like discovery and implementing new things, this is the place for you. - With diversity and inclusion, representation here is the best I’ve seen. Our core team is half women and we have openly LGBTQ+ and POC representation. We’re also self-aware and know our shortcomings and spend time on structural changes to address these issues. - I help set bigger picture strategy but also participate in the execution. At our stage, no one works only on project management, reporting, or analyzing spreadsheets. For example, I helped design a student onboarding experience including capacity scoping and resourcing. But I was also part of the team that administered the experience. - People are (politely) honest, transparent, and very oriented towards making our start-up succeed. This tone was set by our founder, Scott Galloway, who’s known for speaking his mind. With many of my previous employers, there was a need to “kiss the ring” with senior execs and tenured staff. Refreshingly, not here.
Svantaggi
- Future career paths are unclear and largely dependent on the success of the company. There are no defined paths towards promotion/career progression. - Compensation and benefits aren’t competitive. There is also no 401K. Probably similar to other start-ups, the equity and future hope of upside make up a large part of the comp. - We work 50+ hour weeks and are always available. For me, there’s been a lot of “key man dependencies” so I can’t easily share my tasks with others. On the plus side, I can see that I’ll be working very long days in advance. This may be somewhat alleviated in the future with additional hires and tech improvements. - Though I have only been an observer and haven’t been directly involved in hiring, we are slow and patient to hire. Since we’re early days in our start-up, each new hire greatly adds to and affects our culture. We’re happy to be patient until the perfect person comes along to offer what we’re looking for. At times, though, the burden of understaffing gets overwhelming.