Pluspunten
Great place to learn new things, try new ideas, and develop the thick skin and solutions-oriented quick thinking you'll need for startup life. 90% of your coworkers will be amazing, smart, talented people who will go the extra mile for one another.
Protip: care about your team, and not the figurehead(s). You'll feel much prouder of the work you've accomplished and the experience you're getting.
Minpunten
Figurehead has not always demonstrated to know what teamwork or work ethic means. This can trickle down to directors and managers and even sometimes stall a product release. Which can be very bad.
In addition, the hardest-working, most devoted team members are not rewarded, but exploited and squeezed further until they've burnt out or are fired without warning. It's disheartening.
Make sure to take each promise with a grain of salt. They promise stock options to every new employee. This promise, I hear, still has yet to transpire. Even with employees that have been a part of the company since Day 1. They also promised bonuses for reaching sales milestones. With the exception of its very first successful Christmas sale, no additional bonuses have ever transpired. But strangely enough, they are still promised and dangled in front of the employees like an imaginary carrot.
The environment and future is very unstable, which explains why bonuses would disappear around January/February when they do their finances.
Figurehead(s) can sometimes let the stress of the job or the finances get to them, and they can occasionally take it out on an employee. The worst is when they take it out on their hardest, most devoted employees. It really is as though employees that care deeply are set up to disappoint and fail.
Make sure not to give your personal number to Figurehead. Figurehead will blow up your phone if sales/site/something imagined are down at any hour of the day, and has very little sense of boundaries. If you are not white and good looking, figurehead may or may not refer to you in a homophobic or racial manner that may or may not make you and your coworkers feel uncomfortable.
Make sure to be wary of any hires or "free hires" that are friends of the Figurehead. You will be sucked down a rabbithole of crazy. And you will be tasked with managing and feeding the crazy until Figurehead loses interest or freaks out over how much caring for the crazy is costing the company. Just don't do it. Find a way to say no. Don't say you weren't warned.
But don't say No too often. You will be marked as uncooperative and micromanaged to death.