Pros
During the interview / offer process, there is a tendency to look at a company through rose-colored glasses. It's hard to find the negatives. After you join, that's when you find out the negatives. I've been at 6 startups previous to PernixData and, at all of them, I had the experience that I've been "sold", meaning that everything isn't as good as everyone said. At PernixData, I've found that I've been "undersold". Everything is better than i thought. Let's start with product / market fit. PernixData is solving a compelling problem for companies - storage performance in virtualized environments. Companies are paying lots of money to address this issue. The product (FVP) has been uniquely created to solve the problem better than any other product on the market. FVP is a software product, so it doesn't change the customer's VMs, Hosts or SAN. It enhances companies existing storage, so there isn't any disruption to them. It's non-disruptive to customers but extremely disruptive to the storage industry. Then, let's look at the product itself. FVP is easy & reliable. It's so easy to deploy that it takes less than 30-60 minutes to setup and it just works. Customers are finding that FVP will revolutionize they way they look at storage. The last time I was so impressed with a product was with VMware's ESX in 2006 (yes, I was late to the party :-) and the Apple iPhone in 2007. Then, let's look at the execs, the employees and the culture. Everything starts with the founders. Satyam & Poojan are not only smart and hard-working, they are nice & personable as well. I really enjoy working with them. They have hired people with these qualities across execs, middle managers and rank 'n file. There are no prima donnas here. I very much enjoy coming to work. Every day there is a group that is laughing about something. If I had a choice of working from home or working in the office, I would chose to work in the office. There's so much good interaction that happens in the office. This is a company that has legs! I don't know what will happen with this company, but it has a great opportunity ahead of it and the people to take advantage of it.
Cons
We don't seem to get the value in the benefits compared to amount of money the company puts in. They need to find someone that is an expert in employee benefits and figure out how to not only give the most value for the money (in terms of benefits) but also make it easy to utilize the benefits. This is the gaping hole right now