Pros
Traba is filled with some of the best talent in the startup ecosystem, the alumni network is already incredible, and you get to work alongside sharp people every day. The hours are long, but you get close to the people around you and end up having a lot of fun in the process. At Traba, you accomplish in a week what most companies take three to do. Yet it can still feel slow sometimes, because the lift is genuinely greater than at any typical SaaS business, we're actively trying to solve labor. This is a high-intensity environment, and the 996 mentality is not performative. If you want to learn and grow fast, there is no better place. A few years here is enough to have real impact and become the kind of operator every company wants to hire. Leadership understands that 80-hour weeks are hard and that not everyone can sustain that pace indefinitely, they're respectful of that reality, when people eventually leave. Coming from a large fund where I also worked hard and learned a lot, the comparison still isn't close. I'm glad every day that I made the leap, as demanding as it is.
Cons
A few structural things that can make Traba tough. Engineering prioritization sometimes feels misaligned with operational needs. The bigger-picture tooling the business actually needs — worker acquisition, quality screening, communication infrastructure — feels underbuilt, while incremental work gets praised regardless of its impact. Operational failures tend to land on the ops and sales teams rather than being addressed at the source. Middle management is surprisingly fragmented for a company of 70 people. Senior leadership rarely engages with ICs directly, even informally, despite sitting a few desks away. Decisions occasionally land that feel disconnected from day-to-day reality, and because teams aren't consulted or even warned beforehand, pushback tends to get read as insubordination. This distance is, in my view, the root cause of most of the attrition here.