An external recruiter contacted me. They scheduled a call with a hiring manager at Hopper, and the call went well. The company arranged for follow-up interviews with the rest of the team. I did my interviews, enjoyed meeting the team, and was excited to potentially work with them. I did well, and the company told me that I only needed to do a behavioral interview with an exec team member to complete the process. It took many days to schedule this interview because the exec was super busy.
Finally, I was given a different exec to interview with, and the exec interview went well. I debriefed with the internal recruiter the same day, and he told me the manager I initially spoke with would be presenting me an offer in the afternoon. Later in the day, I received a new invitation to meet with the recruiter. The recruiter told me that while I couldn't join the original team, Hopper found an exciting team for me that would be a better fit. However, this better fit team would require additional tech screening with the new hiring manager as well another PM interview round(we're hitting 7 interviews now) to get an offer. I did the HM interview and wasn't asked any specific team-related questions but rather a standard leetcode style question similar to what I had already successfully completed throughout the interview loop. I was really annoyed at this point and didn't put all my effort into getting a solution, resulting in a delay in my implementation. An hour later I was rejected by Hopper.
I thankfully had other offers and didn't need to pass this round. However, I wasted a lot of time and effort both interviewing with the company, researching it, and imagining my place in it. Ultimately if you're going to invest in this process, keep in mind that Hopper is not above telling you have an offer from them and reneging that offer in less than 8 hours. You might have to go through 7 interviews to receive an offer, and the company might attempt to spin that fact in a positive light instead of owning up to a disorganization failure on their end. While the company did apologize at the end of the process, they only did so after the final interview and subsequent rejection.