Vantaggi
Small fun and friendly team. The product concept is great and definitely a hot button with customers. A lot of great ideas, but its sad that they might not make it.
Svantaggi
They've hired friends, family and kids straight out of school - possibly to keep costs down ? This makes the office environment awkward and unprofessional. They don't do funding rounds or pitches like other startups. It seems like all they do is file patents for stuff they have not yet created in hopes to sell out at some point. For a small company they've spent their money opening up shop in too many locations at once and spreading out too early. Not everyone is treated equally or given the same amounts of work freedom - some people just work from home while others are held to a strict 8-7 standard ('stuff picks up around 6 PM' apparently), some work on the other side of the country and are rarely seen around if at all. Most of the development is contracted out and they fail to take control of their own product from their contractors. This frustrates internal engineers since they have to play a game of 'catch-up'. Some teams refuse to adopt common development practices like sprints and standups and are poorly managed. The people who have ended up in high positions dont even code - it seems like they were just put there due to prevailing friendships. To fix poor design and product conception, engineers from a specific domain are set on tasks that are so far outside their scope that they might as well be in arts and crafts class. The engineers and design team work hard and try their best to pick up the slack where ever they can by jumping in without complaining. The engineering areas are lacklustre at best. They celebrate the fact that they have tables made of doors (WTF ??!) and the pantry is just soo filthy. Every month they end up apologizing to their customers for not being able to deliver despite a year long back log of pre-orders. Sometimes they even laugh at their customers and their responses (I feel this is in really poor taste)