What it's like to work for a growth stage startup

In August, Regrow Agriculture Inc had a big round of layoffs affecting 20% of the company and, startlingly, 40% of the technical team. The geospatial engineering team was effected at a level of 3/5, including my job. Writing down some parting thoughts...

Regrow was the second venture capital backed startup which I worked for, the first being Descartes Labs from '17-'19. They had quite a lot in common, being geospatial tech companies, both in series B or growth phase. Observing some of the common patterns I saw:

Pros

🤩 Work with more talented engineers and scientists

🚀 Quickly level up skills especially in distributed systems, data engineering and big data

✈️ Build the airplane while flying it. Not really a Pro or a Con, more "it is what it is"

Cons

🙈 Hiring is going faster than the company ops, culture and institutional knowledge can absorb the new resources

📉 No stability- the market and investors can change their minds so quickly

P.S. I recommend the book Hello Startup by Yevgeniy (Jim) Brikman.