As I mentioned in my previous blog post celebrating Pandora’s 20th Anniversary, Steve Hogan, the Senior Director of Music Analysis (and my boss), happens to be the most senior member of the Pandora staff, clocking in at the quarter century mark, making me look like a noob with my mere twenty-one years. According to his memory, he was the 18th music analyst hired to the company, back in September of 2000, roughly nine months after the founding of the company.
So, in addition to having steered Pandora’s ambitious Music Genome project from the beginning, Steve is basically the company’s de facto oral historian. I thought it would be interesting to share some of his memories from the early days.
First, some context: January, 2000 was the beginning of the end of the initial Dot-com Bubble. Right as founder Tim Westergren was starting to ramp up his new company, Savage Beast (our name before Pandora), the oceans of venture capital were starting to dry up. In fact, right around the exact time that Steve was hired as a Music Analyst, the Dot-com I was working for (Modo) was going under, as were many, many others.
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But none of this was on Steve’s radar at the time. He was just a musician in his twenties, scraping by in the Bay Area music scene, when he came across a flyer on a telephone pole in Berkeley. “It said something like, ‘Hey Musicians! Looking for the perfect day job?’”
The original “office” was Tim Westergren's apartment, but by the time Steve got hired, they were set up in an actual office in a quiet corner of Downtown Oakland, a couple blocks from the Ask Jeeves offices. “We were analyzing songs with paper and pencil,” Steve recalls, “then we’d hand the pages to temps who would manually enter them into spreadsheets.”
The Music Analysis crew grew to about 32 employees, and eventually they got a computerized system in place to record the analyses. In 2001, with about 15-20 thousand songs analyzed, Savage Beast was hired to build a jazz discovery interface for a major company’s website. Things were looking up.
Then the bottom fell out of the Dot-com economy. Westergren went into personal debt to float the company as long as possible, but according to Steve, “The money ran dry and paychecks became spotty.” One by one, analysts dropped off, until the staff was reduced to just one person.
“It was just me,” said Steve. I’d come into the office once a week, I’d check out the Billboard 200 chart and I’d look at any new albums that popped up. Then I’d drive over to Amoeba records, buy the CDs and analyze a track off each one.”
Then finally, late in 2002 just before Christmas, Steve recalled Westergren firing the entire company.
“I remember him saying, ‘I am plum out of money.’ Before I left, he pulled me aside and said, ‘I still think I can do this. I’m going to give you a call.’ I had to go and get a temp job over the holidays. But right after the new year, I got a call from Tim and he’d gotten more money and he brought me back.”
The lore is that Westergren pitched Pandora 360 times and received 360 no’s from venture capitalists. Then finally he landed a multi-million-dollar funding round.
Steve remembers that day well. Westergren called a company meeting, “and he immediately came in with a stack of envelopes and paid us back for all the hours we’d deferred. There were about 50 people who had worked for little or no pay for eighteen months.” Westergren doled out one-and-a-half million dollars in salary that day.
I asked Steve what had motivated him to stick through those many months without pay. “I just liked the idea. Tim was very convincing. I figured, let’s take a risk. Maybe it’ll work out and it’ll be a job that I like for a long time.”
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