On a rainy evening, around 150 individuals ventured out towards the Danville Community Center to listen to Joe Kennedy, CEO and president of Pandora Radio?talk concerning the evolution from the business.
Kennedy, a 13-year Danville resident beats pro,?spoke Thursday as a guest from the Danville Library and the Friends of the Danville Library.
Kennedy shared using the audience what he characterized as "the Russian novel" version of how Pandora got its begin, as well as how the business grew to command 70 percent of Web radio's listeners. He fielded questions and feedback from the audience.
Kennedy said Pandora originated from "the spark of an idea" by founder and present Chief Technique Officer dr dre headphones, Tim Westergren.
Westergren, a Stanford graduate beats by dre studio, played professionally with his band, Yellowwood Junction monster beats, formed in 1993, and had built an audience through regional touring monster headphones, whilst also working in the film business as a film score composer.
From those experiences came the "crazy idea" that may solve an issue that was "near and dear to him": how do bands connect with people and build their audiences, and how do listeners uncover new music that matches their person musical tastes?
With a small quantity of funding to get it going, Westergren launched the Music Genome Project?in 2000.
The concept involved utilizing musicians "with a deep background in music theory" to systematically categorize person pieces of music in all genres into a sophisticated hand-made taxonomy produced up of more than 400 attributes. As soon as the music was categorized, complex algorithms had been applied to predict and match a user's distinctive listening preferences and recommend other musical choices.
Kennedy likens how the multi-functional algorithms work to a bonsai tree. Individuals start out with a comparable tree, but through their thumbs up and thumbs down interactive feedback, the tree grows new limbs, or the user trims and reshapes the tree.
The business skilled some early achievement with their concept, and was featured on kiosks in choose Best Purchase shops. Whilst it was effective in growing sales, by 2002, the music business was fundamentally changing, and consumers increasingly moved away from purchasing CDs to downloading music.
While Westergren's concept was sound, the business model was not. Pandora was operating on fumes.
Kennedy said the company had "even exhausted the fumes" of their initial funding by 2003, and faced eviction from their decrepit Oakland office developing. A devoted core group of 20-30 individuals remained, who had been operating without pay for two years.
Pandora might have gone the way of so many other start-ups with excellent suggestions but execution problems had it not been for the fortuitous connection between Westergren and an angel investor, Larry Marcus, with Walden Venture Capital.
Marcus, who was himself a drummer, recognized that Westergren had a "great piece of intellectual property, but within the incorrect business."
Marcus took a big chance and invested $8 million, $2 million of which instantly went to spend back wages to the employees that had remained with Pandora whilst it struggled for life.
Kennedy, who had a background in building consumer companies, and other executives were brought on board in 2004 to reconfigure the company's management team, allowing Westergren to concentrate on strategy.
They retooled the company's company vision towards interacting directly with consumers instead of businesses, and worked on developing "one-click, customized radio."
Kennedy stated he never believed that he would join a music company, and also the chance "came out of left field."
He said he decided to join Pandora because he "fell in love" using the people, their sense of objective and passion, and also the vibe of the company. Westergren was "the most likeable guy he ever met on the planet," he stated.
But, Kennedy's "left-brain MBA" company sense also told him that Westergren had possibly solved the huge and almost universal problem?aperhaps the final big problem?aof overcoming overwhelming option as a barrier for music and music lovers to locate 1 another.
Pandora instantly took off, and fueled solely by word-of-mouth created by its growing legion of fans, it grew "like wildfire." Actually, Kennedy stated they did not need to invest any conventional advertising dollars; the buzz took on a life of its personal.
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