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The Pandora Story - 384 Pitches Later!

September 5, 2008

Tim Westergren - Pandora Founder by you.Last night I had pleasure of listening to a talk by Pandora founder Tim Westergren.  He began by explaining how he raised angel financing in the early 2000, ran out of money a few years later and ultimately raised several million dollars (they have raised even more since).  It took Tim 384 pitch meetings with Venture Capital groups to finally raise the money he needed to keep the company going. Tim has been traveling the country meeting with users in more than 100 cities.  He is a very charming guy, very cool.

Pandora, based on Tim’s earlier work on the Music Genome Project, has 16 million listeners and is growing by 30,000 listeners a day.  Their goal is to be the largest radio station on the planet.  If they can work out their licensing and copyright problems I suspect they could eventually have hundreds of millions of listeners.  The way Pandor a works is really intriguing.  Basically Pandor hires musicians to listen to songs and rate 150-400 traits or as they call them genes.  Their software thens caculates distance between songs, and built on the assumption that you will like similar songs creates a radio station for you that plays these similar tunes.  The service also learns, taking cues from listeners as they give a song a thumbs up or thumbs down.  Anyway, very interesting.

Written by Alexander Muse · Filed Under Blog, Startups 

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