Founding Managing Director
Panos A. Panay is the founder and current managing director of the Berklee Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship (BerkleeICE) as well as a passionate entrepreneur, educator, and startup mentor. As the founder of Sonicbids, he created the leading platform for bands to book gigs and market themselves online, building a subscriber network of 550,000 bands and 35,000 promoters from more than 100 countries. He led the company as CEO for 13 years, from its inception until after its successful acquisition in a deal backed by Guggenheim Partners.
Panay is also the cofounder of the Open Music Initiative, which has brought together more than 200 leading music, media, technology industry organizations, and academic institutions to create a blockchain-based open protocol for uniform identification of musical rights owners and creators.
At Berklee, his work and approach to entrepreneurial and innovation pedagogy builds heavily on the concepts of music thinking, and in particular jazz, as a catalyst for creative breakthroughs in business, life, and art; and he has spearheaded multi-disciplinary collaborations between Berklee and MIT; the design firm IDEO; and Brown University. He writes frequently about startups and entrepreneurship for blogs and publications such as Forbes, WSJ Accelerators, and Fast Company; and guest lectures and speaks at many universities and events around the world.
Awards include Fast Company's "Fast 50" honor; Inc Magazine's "Inc 500”; Mass Hi-Tech All Stars; Berklee College of Music's Distinguished Alumnus Award; Boston Business Journal’s “40 under 40;” and BostInno's 50 on Fire. Sonicbids and Panay were also profiled in a chapter in the Financial Times-published book Outsmart by best-selling author Jim Champy.
Panay is a native of Cyprus and holds a Music Business/Management degree from Berklee College of Music.
