It’s safe to call Pandora co-founder Tim Westergren a musical genius. He’s an award-winning composer, musician and record producer with over 20 years of experience in the music industry, and he helped put together one of the top music streaming services in the world. We’re grateful that Westergren will be dropping some sick beats at Disrupt SF 2015.
Together with Will Glaser and Jon Kraft, Westergren co-founded Pandora in January 2000, and currently serves as the company’s Chief Strategy Officer. Pandora is powered by the Music Genome Project, a mathematical algorithm built by Westergren and Glaser that organizes music into different categories using over 450 attributes to describe songs.
Pandora raised over $56 million before going public in June 2011 at a valuation of around $2.6 billion. The company has logged over 250 million registered users, with 79.2 million active users in Q1, 2015, and its users listened to over 20 billion hours of music in 2014.
Pandora’s financial performance has been hit or miss of late, beating Wall Street expectations in Q1 2015 by bringing in bringing in $230.8 million in Q1 2015 on a loss of 12 cents per share, but missing estimates in Q4 2014 with revenue of $268 million and diluted earnings per share of 18 cents.
Westergren himself earned a B.A. from Stanford, where he studied computer acoustics and recording technology. In addition to his role as Chief Strategy Officer at Pandora, he also spends a good amount of time as Pandora’s chief evangelist, traveling around the US meeting with Pandora listeners to gather feedback and find local talent to bring to the service.
We can’t wait to hear what Westergren has to say about where he plans to take the music service in light of increased competition from the likes of Spotify and Apple at Disrupt SF 2015. He joins other talented speakers like Y Combinator’s Sam Altman, rock star Pinterest developer Tracy Chou and legendary VC Vinod Khosla.
Come and hear all these excellent speakers and more at Disrupt SF 2015, which runs from September 21 – 23 at San Francisco’s historic Pier 70. You can get your tickets at special early bird prices here.
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