Talk of Tim Westergren (founder of Pandora)

Tim Westergren gave us a talk about his company Pandora (the music genome project), an automated music recommendation and Internet radio service. You type a song and it finds the closest in terms of ~400 attributes. For him, each of the 400 attributes is considered a gen.

Pandora employs ~120 people (most of them with musical background) mainly doing taxonomy of songs (equivalent of a MBTI test for music, as he likes to call it). Each song requires between 15 and 45 minutes to classify.

Some interesting facts he gave about radio is that the average American listens to 20 hours of music a week and 17 of them is radio (despite CDs, iPod, etc.).

He mentioned some interesting things about his experience in entrepreneurship:

• When they started (right after the bubble) he asked his employees for a salary deferral; and they spent 2.5 years without a salary!  (later he found that this is illegal in California)
• He pitched his company 348 times to VCs! (he counted them!). A clear sign of commitment, determination, passion, persistance, and perserverance!
• VCs did not like the idea because it is not scalable since it requires human beings classifying song by song (30 minutes per song and they wanted to classify every song!). However, once you have done it, it is a big asset  (it reminds me of Skyhook wireless)
• They have 11 million user after starting in November 2005 (now they have 25K new listeners per day). And they do not do any advertisement! it is all blogs, chats, forums, etc. Thus they have no customer acquisition cost and investors/VCs love it.

I have to say that I am a big fan of Pandora and it really works for me!