Wise

A really mission-driven company that deeply cares about the customers. The culture is nice and chill. In product engineering teams, you can work in a relaxed manner, and only a few teams will ever challenge you on this.

Contrary to expectations, you won't find too many smart, good performers around you. TransferWise doesn't compensate in the high brackets to attract them, while most original employees with high stock packages have left by now.

People in engineering teams are almost never let go, so you can imagine the environment this creates for the talent pool.

The level of technical debt is very high for most teams, and it is really hard to develop things quickly. It doesn't help that the leadership team prefers to ignore these problems, almost always prioritizing features (however minor) over long-term fundamental fixing.

It was long overdue to change the CEO.

Kristo is a great, customer-driven person, but his leadership and management skills became under-qualified when TransferWise reached 100 employees.

I truly believe TransferWise can maintain its amazing independent teams culture without becoming a corporation, but this will require a different type of leadership.