The Counterintuitive Secret To Pandora's Success
Pandora has never had a more pivotal moment than this one. The 75 million user-strong service is synonymous with Internet radio, but a growing list of competitors (which now includes Apple) and its royalty dance with the record industry loom large.
It's a classic tech business conundrum. The world looks at Pandora as a new standard, but its position is actually much more precarious: To keep thriving, Pandora needs to ink major deals inside and outside the U.S. This is the kind of stress that would crush a lot of founders, but Tim Westergren says he'll fall back on an old standby: naiveté.
"The only reason I did [Pandora] was because I was naive," Westergren says. "I would say that entrepreneurship in general requires naiveté. Were you not naive, it could be so daunting that you would either not try it in the first place or you'd give up if you began to see things getting difficult."