Sonicbids Reviews

3.5

61% would recommend to a friend

(20 total reviews)

Patrick Inverso

100% approve of CEO

68% positive business outlook

Sonicbids has an employee rating of 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 20 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Sonicbids employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Media and communication industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

20 reviews
1.0
5 Feb 2012

Cool company with poor CEO leadership

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

2.0
6 Nov 2014

Had potential

Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Pretty decent benefits. Nice coworkers. Nice camaraderie, relationship building. Good business idea.

Cons

Weak leadership. The wrong qualities were rewarded. Some very untalented and unqualified people held important positions and dropped the ball constantly. Other departments that depended on these positions to be successful at their jobs were left having to pick up the pieces and run with them lest fail a project. As you can imagine this resulted in delays and sometimes less than high quality work, which subsequently they were blamed for despite voicing concerns about lack of commitment or quality from the poor performers. New hires in key positions were infallible for several moths causing major rifts in the company. Lots of good people were lost as a result (voluntarily or forcibly) CEO had a great vision but his execution left much to be desired.

2.0
10 May 2010

No where to go

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Cool culture and down to earth people with passionate CEO. The concept of company is interesting with online press kits provided for all artists and managers.

Cons

Not a lot of communication going on between upper management and rest of departments. Get used to doing the same thing over a long period of time because there is not a lot of promoting going on unless someone leaves the company; given it's incredibly small size and loyalty of employees. Employees don't seem to be motivated or ambitious enough to want to be promoted or do much with thier career since many are lifetime musicians and artists at heart--most employees graduated from Berklee school of music. The busiest positions at the company are in the customer service department since many of their clients are unhappy with the membership they charge and the service Sonicbids actually provides.

Viewing 1 - 3 of 20 Reviews

Glassdoor has 25 Sonicbids reviews submitted anonymously by Sonicbids employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Sonicbids is right for you.