Tom Conrad: evaluation

Transcript context

…er of Savage Beast. Savage Beast was like a seven or eight full-time employees at that point. They made a music recommendation engine that they licensed to other companies to put in consumer products. So Savage Beast's customers were Best Buy, who put it in kiosks, and AOL, who used it on the AOL Music website. And they were looking for a VP of engineering. And I got the offer, thought about it a little bit. I declined because it was kind of this B2B2C thing and I really wanted to do something consumer and I had an idea about the app. And a month later, they called again and said, "We keep talking to people. We really think that you're the person." And interestingly, one of the reasons they thought that I was the person is they were really impressed by the fact that I had run engineering at Pets.com. So I mean, it's just one of those things where these things do pay dividends, even when they're a disaster. And honestly, what I would really say was almost like a lapse in judgment, I said yes, even though it wasn't the product that I wanted to build. And I won't bore you with all of the details, but 90 days later, after some typical early stage founder drama stuff, the founding head of technology and product had resigned completely unrelated to my arrival. And the company had a new CEO, Joe Kennedy, and Joe had this idea for what he called the 1-Click Personal Radio. And Joe is a product marketer and just the best CEO in the whole world. We spent 10 years together building Pandora. And he sort of gave me the keys and just said, "As long as it fits the brief for 1-Click Personal Radio, it's all yours." And I got to build the team and the culture, in collaboration with him and Tim the founder, over the course of the next 10 years, and just every good thing. So I mean, there's just a million billion lessons from Pandora, and everything I am as a product leader and then an engineering leader comes from things that happen at Pandora. But maybe the thing that I think of first is, I think we met our early audience in an incredibly genuine way. For example, when we launched the support@pandora.com was an alias for all@pandora.com. So if you sent a customer service request to Pandora, every single person in the company received it. And because we made a decision to have no customer support team in the first year, the expectation was that whoever sees the request first should respond to it. And so you would write to us and you would get the founder or you'd get me or you'd get the engineer who wrote the feature or you'd get the CEO. And there were no macros to respond to commonly asked question. There was no read the FAQ. And there were no rules about what you could and couldn't say. If the person's like, "I think this feature is stupid and broken," we would encourage people to say, "You know what? I think you're right and I'm really struggling to get our stupid head of product to agree with me. I'm going to CC Tom and maybe we can convince him that this was a bad decision." say, "You know what? I think you're right and I'm really struggling to get our stupid head of product to agree with me. I'm going to CC Tom and maybe we can convince him that this was a bad decision." And we did all of that because we thought one of our superpowers as a young company was that we could just engage with our audience as real human beings, not as a shiny brand that was trying to be something that we could just never be. This period is where the iPod and iTunes are at the peak of their powers. And so there was no way we could sort of out-Apple Apple on the brand front. And so we were just ourselves, and I think it really, really was a catalyst for the word of mouth that developed around Pandora. And we never spent any money on paid user acquisition, literally no dollars in the entire time I was there, because people loved the product and they told their friends about it and that's how it grew. I saw a stat that you grew Pandora from 0 to 80 million users, from 10 employees to 3000 employees, from 0 basically to a multi-billion dollar company.…

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