![]() ![]() ![]() Founders and Their Evolving Rolesįounders are inventors and bring companies to life. If you want a team that comes together in tough times, you need to hire carefully and understand why someone wants to join your company. Team Camaraderie: When a company is in turmoil, there are two ways the team can react: One is the team comes together and supports each other and commits to see it through, and the other way is the team that scatters. PANDORA RADIO EMPLOYEES FULLThey want the full story, and they deserve it. It’s exactly when things are crashing down that you need to be the most honest with those on your team so they can trust you. It’s easiest to be transparent when everything is going great, and the tendency is to keep information from the team when things aren’t working. Transparency: In the toughest of times, it’s easy to want to keep information from your team. At one point, Westergren had maxed out 11 credit cards. Westergren and the founding team began deferring their salaries long before anyone else did - and he even paid employees’ salaries with his credit card when times got tough. At the time, it felt like a bit of magic in a box, and the team was proud of what they’d built and believed they could make a business out of it.įirst One In, Last One Out: As a leader, Westergren knew he had to be the first one in and last one out of the office every day and lead by example. Love the Product: The early team at Pandora believed deeply that the actual idea and product was great. Upon reflection, Westergren attributes this kind of remarkable fortitude to a few key attributes: With bleak prospects, the core group of about 50 Pandora team members ended up working for almost two and a half years without any salary. Westergren went from pitch meeting to pitch meeting, up and down Sand Hill Road to no avail. At the end of 2000, Pandora began to run out of money. The Best Buy integration wasn’t the only challenging time in the early years at Pandora. Thus, instead of spending a massive amount of time and energy getting into the hardware business or driving a hard deal with IBM, he, instead, chose to focus the company on pure software. It was a moment of humility and in that moment, he decided to always stay focused on what you’re good at and leverage partners for what they’re good at - and remember your place in the ecosystem. Through some intense negotiations, Westergren quickly came to the realization that he was a tiny cash-strapped start-up playing on a field of elephants and was at risk of being crushed. So, here Westergren was, leading a six-person company with IBM essentially begging for what could be a hundred-million-dollar-plus deployment into Best Buy. PANDORA RADIO EMPLOYEES SOFTWARENot surprisingly, given that Pandora was a pure software company, IBM really wanted the hardware deal to power the kiosks. Westergren and his team hacked together a Web kiosk with IBM parts soldered together by their CTO - and ultimately won the business from some huge players after hundreds of consumers loved the Pandora experience at the test site. At the time, underneath Best Buy’s HQ was a replica Best Buy Store where they ran consumer tests before they were rolled out to their network of actual stores. Westergren and his other six colleagues flew to Best Buy’s headquarters in Richfield, MN, to sell them on the idea of a music kiosk in every store. He recalled the early days, being part of a bake-off at Best Buy. Originally a B2B company, Westergren had to fight for every single deal and dollar just to keep the lights on. Pandora wasn’t the stereotypical overnight success story of the dot-com boom. So, instead of launching another music website, Westergren decided to build a pure B2B technology company to solve the hard problem of music discovery.īelow are a few lessons from First Round Capital's CEO Summit that Westergren learned the hard way through the process of going from Savage Beast Technologies to Pandora Radio and through a billion-dollar IPO. ![]() (Remember, this was a time when broadband barely existed.) They all faced the same problem: tons of music and no way for listeners to find the good stuff. At the time of launch, there was an increasing number of music startups coming online. ![]() In 1999, Tim Westergren, a long-time musician, started Savage Beast Technologies, with the mission of connecting artists with their audiences and helping people discover new music. ![]()
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