Vantaggi
Sonicbids is a fun place to work, as it has a laid-back culture and you can interact with cool musicians and promoters. People are really friendly, fun, and truly love music. You can wear what you want to work and play music at your desk all day long. Also, from an outside world perspective, its cool to say you work at an internet music startup. If you display leadership and are a top performer, you can be "promoted" quickly (although these are often just lateral moves with different title names). Great ideas make it up to management fairly quickly (although very very few are actually executed), so if you're willing to put in the work, you can get on management radar early and often.
Svantaggi
Sonicbids is a very small company that is completely defined by its Founder and CEO, Panos Panay. As Panos goes, Sonicbids goes. And Panos is highly mercurial, egocentric, and a micromanager. All of Sonicbids culture, strategy, hiring/firing decisions, pretty much everything is ultimately run by Panos. He is notorious for hiring top management talent, then micromanaging them to the point where they either quit in frustration or he fires them for being unable to accomplish anything. He is a fantastic salesman, and pitches the company both internally and externally as a fun, innovative, fast-moving, forwarding-thinking startup that belongs with the likes of Google, Apple, etc. But in reality, he quashes most innovation internally, changes his mind daily (often with complete disregard for the hard work and good thinking his staff has put in), is a bottleneck for decision making, and is always more concerned with how the company looks than how it does. I can't stress this enough. In any given situation, Panos cares mostly about appearance (his and the company) to the outside world, and much less about actual performance or creating real value. On a side note, the pay here is horrendous. Their formula is to hire cheap young talent (typically immediately post-college) and promote top performers to management positions, pay them well below what you'd pay a real manager, and fill underneath them with more entry-level workers. They typically offer top performers good stock options, but it's unclear if there will ever be a liquidity event where they can cash their stock out. In all fairness, as a cash-strapped startup there's not much else Sonicbids could do in terms of compensation without further straining its thin finances.