How Pandora Avoided the Junkyard, and Found Success | Hacker News Reader

How Pandora Avoided the Junkyard, and Found Success

nytimes.com

48 pointspeter12314 comments

I've been a Pandora fan for so long, this article surprised me a bit because I've been so accustomed to them being on the edge of collapse. I remember making donations years ago. I'm glad they're eating "truffle-infused Kobe beef burger[s]" these days.

Pretty awesome how he kept going even when they had no money in the bank. Most other people would've given up. That and it is amazing how employees stuck around without getting paid make me want root for them even more!

> Every two weeks, he held all-hands meetings to beg people to work, unpaid, for another two weeks. That went on for two years.

What's really astonishing is how long he managed to keep this up. He must have been an extremely good motivator and hired lots of incredibly dedicated employees. If he didn't get his eventual lucky break, these people's lives would have been wrecked.

There must be a lesson to be learned here, though I have some doubts if it is repeatable.

> In March 2004, he made his 348th pitch seeking backers...

I'm surprised he had so much difficulty raising VC after that. You'd think a story like that would get around. Many entrepreneurs have proven track records of success, but few have proven they can persevere against all odds.

...348 pitches!

I love the fact he earmarked $2 mil of the $9 mil investment to then go and pay back-pay to his employees. The right thing to do.

I'm astonished that the VCs were OK with this. Pandora must have had crazy-ass growth, because using new funds to pay people for past performance is very, very rare.

| There must be a lesson to be learned here, though I have some doubts if it is repeatable. |

I'd love to see a Mixergy interview!

Starting out with a passion for music pushed him to keep going. Must assume that his employees saw/had this passion too.

"Some music lovers dislike Pandora’s approach to choosing music based on its characteristics rather than cultural associations. Slacker Radio, a competitor with three times as many songs but less than a third of Pandora’s listeners, takes a different approach. A ’90s alternative station should be informed by Seattle grunge, said Jonathan Sasse, senior vice president for marketing at Slacker. “It’s not just that this has an 80-beat-a-minute guitar riff,” he said. “It’s that this band toured with Eddie Vedder.”"

I always thought Pandora did this, but never admitted to it. Their stated reasons for what music they play don't really add up--when I have a certain band defined as the seed for my station, it invariably plays songs from the various solo albums, side projects, and former members of that band.

Given the economics of the online music industry, Pandora is a truly admirable success story. I think what's great about it isn't necessarily that it's a superior music service (since there are so many that are awesome), but that their recommendation system is actually pretty good.

I've found a lot of music through listening to Pandora. But I'm not their ideal customer -- when they took away the pop out mini player I hacked together an Adobe AIR app to replace it, mostly just cropping the pandora.com homepage. For some reason it eats a lot of memory though.

In case anyone missed it, Sarah Lacy did a TechCrunch article & NBC video interview last year:

http://techcrunch.com/2009/09/25/pandora-from-near-death-to-...

I like the picture included with the article. You know a company's successful when they give everyone those incredibly expensive and ergonomically poor cubicles instead of a $60 IKEA table.

Wish the photo was a little more detailed - I can't tell what brand of headphones those are! They kinda look like Sony.. which is the aural equivalent of that awful desk =/

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