Tim Westergren, Founder of Pandora

[DudeAsInCool]

Imagine a day in the life of the founder of an online radio company spending most of his time traveling the country meeting his users face to face. Not just paying lip service to listening to his users, I had the adventure of an interview with Tim Westergren by cell phone while Tim was driving around Athens, Georgia en route to a meet-up with Pandora listeners! This guy is the real deal.

Welcome to Pandora, simply the future of radio. Try it for awhile, and traditional radio will seem awkward, outdated… you will get impatient with it! Just log onto www.pandora.com, pop in the name of a musician or band you like, and you will get a customized flow of DJ sets based upon similar artists, each ‘DJ set’ focusing on a different quality of your favorite music. Pop in a few more bands, and your personal ‘DJ’ will incorporate them too. When you like something you key in a thumbs up, if you don’t you key in a thumbs down, so your DJ gets to know you better and better. Your DJ will continually throw in new obscure music you never would have imagined but that fits right in with what you like, as well as oldies that also fit right in. You can set up separate customized ‘radio stations’ just by grouping together a few bands you like, your personal Pandora DJ will do the rest for you.

This seamless, intuitive, customized experience is made possible by the ‘Music Genome Project’ which is about 40 musicians studying countless songs, artists, and bands and characterizing them by about 400 attributes, including the ‘soul’ of each song. They keep adding more and more music as guided by the almost 2 million listeners Pandora has attracted within 6 months without even advertising. I chatted with Tim about how it all happened, and what we can expect in the future.

Read the full interview at

American Chronicle