Tom Conrad

It seems that the big news out of Gnomedex last week was the “drama” that played out around Jason Calacanis’ presentation. The basic context is this: Jason took the stage to talk about spam content creeping into search results. This is clearly a topic that Jason is passionate about — so much so that he’s created a company that he hopes will tackle the problem through a new kind of editorially-influenced search engine. As he spoke, it became clear that his talk was going to segue right into a discussion of how his company could solve this problem.

Generally the presentations at Gnomedex aren’t about particular products or companies. There are exceptions to be sure (for example, this year the CEO of JibJab gave one of the more interesting talks, which was almost entirely about his company). I don’t have a strongly held point of view on this subject; for my part I just want the presentations to be interesting. If that means talking about your company so be it.

So, as Jason gets going, he’s talking about spam (”unwanted commercial pitches”) showing up everywhere, especially in search, and it occurs to someone in the back of the room that if he’s going to segue right into Mahalo, then the talk is sort of “conference spam.” That struck some as funny and ironic. There was some mumbling and giggling from the back of the room. Jason noticed, paused, hesitated, something — and Dave Winer said “You’re doing it now! You’re spamming us!”

This is what I thought at the time: that’s kinda funny. Maybe a tiny bit obnoxious to yell it out, but Jason’s pitch was a tad ironic. I think I chuckled a bit. Then I went right back to listening — with some interest frankly — to what Jason had to say. We use subject matter experts at Pandora to classify music, so there are some parallels with Mahalo and I wanted to hear more.

I would never have thought about it again.

And then the blogosphere picked it up. The first accounts I read sounded like “HUGE BLOWUP AT GNOMEDEX!!!” Strange, I thought — my experience of the event was quite different: it was a non-event for me.

Could it be that we wanted to invent a little drama to attach to what was really a pretty sedate little conference? That maybe, just maybe, the entire thing wasn’t about what Dave said at all? Given that very real possiblility, it doesn’t seem right for Dave to be at the epicenter of an invented conroversy, with lots of old stories of ancient feuds and perceived injustices being dredged up. When I saw Dave at BarCampBlock on Saturday, I told him as much. He mentioned it on ScriptingNews today so I thought I’d say a bit more about my perspective on what happened.

Wow. What an event.

Tremendous turnout — not sure they have a perfect count of attendees but easily 600 people. The huge grid quickly filled up with fascinating content from all corners of the tech, community, and art communities. Some giant sessions, some small sessions, but a spirit of sharing that I think embodies the current vibe in silicon valley. This was a gathering of people that are passionate about the work they do who share an eagerness to learn from their peers. Incredibly exciting.

I had the pleasure of leading a small group discussion about Music Rights issues (who gets paid what for various forms of digital music). For me this conversation perfectly embodied the spirit of BarCamp — just a handful of people sitting down to share what they know about a complex topic in the hopes that everyone would walk away better informed, and more prepared to build great things.

Later in the day I lead a much bigger discussion examining the evolution of Pandora in the two years since the first BarCamp. Great fun and lots of interesting questions. Incredible how different things are for Pandora than they were two years ago. I’m really lucky to be involved in something that so many people enjoy.

No discussion of BarCamp would really be complete without a mention of the people that create these events — people like Chris Messina, Tantek Çelik. Ross Mayfield, and Tara Hunt. You all are an inspiration to me. Thanks for all you’ve done for this community.

Two years ago, when Pandora was still in its (oh-so-short) private beta, I decided to head down to a two-day event in Palo Alto called BarCamp. The rules were simple: you show up, you present. It would turn out to be the very first public demo of Pandora. And it was done absolutely on a whim.

Shortly after I arrived, I wrote my name on the whiteboard offering a talk about our new music service (cleverly titled “Introducing Pandora”). I remember listening to Chris Messina’s talk about Flock just before it was my turn to present. Michael Arrington was there and asked for a quick demo because he couldn’t stick around for my presentation. While I’d met Mike before, TechCrunch felt like one of his little side projects to me. I was happy to give him the demo early, but I’ve got to tell you it wasn’t anything like what folks go through today to get on his agenda. What I remember most is he gave me a bunch of crap about not inviting him to the beta (we’d met at Gnomedex and it had competely slipped my mind). Pretty funny in retrospect.

The presentation went well enough (and the demo worked); some folks wrote nice things. It was a fun and very memorable day. I met a lot of people that day that have become good friends.

Tomorrow is BarCampBlock — the two year anniversary of that original BarCamp. It simultaneously feels like a very long time ago, and like it was just yesterday. Certainly my whole world has changed, as has Pandora. I’m excited to head down and throw my hat into the ring again… should be quite an event. They’re expecting 900 people. I’ll be there again this year and Pandora is providing the music for the after party at SocialText.

Starting at 12:00AM Eastern time on June 26, 2007, Pandora will be participating in the Internet Radio “Day of Silence.”

Joining Pandora are Yahoo, Live365, MTV, SomaFM, Bagel Radio, Rhapsody, and dozens of small webcasters. The idea behind this event is to give everyone a glimpse of what it will be like if the oppressive royalty rates recently set by the Copyright Royalty Board are left unchanged. You can read more about the issue at SaveNetRadio.org. There are bills pending in both the Senate and in the House and I’d encourage you to lend your voice to the cause if you love Internet Radio. Please call your representative to let them know that this is an issue that matters to you.

While I believe in the statement we’re making with the Day of Silence, this is a painful night for me. Taking Pandora off the air is something that we don’t do lightly — in fact when we moved datacenters a year ago we worked long and hard to ensure that we didn’t have any down time at all during that transition. To take our music off the air intentionally is completely unprecedented in our 2 year history. It’s not something that I’ll enjoy. Here’s hoping though that the Day of Silence helps to move our lawmakers into action, so I don’t someday in the not-too-distant future have to pull the plug on Pandora entirely.

We’ve been working with the team at Sonos for about 6 months to get the Pandora Everywhere experience on their family of devices. During that time I’ve of course had the chance to listen to a Sonos here in the office a fair bit as we iterated together on builds. What I wasn’t able to do was to experience it in my own home. That all changed 48 hours ago when I setup my own multi-room Sonos system.

Best. Thing. Ever.

I’m a huge fan of Slim Devices and have been a very, very happy Slim customer for many years (going all the way back to their very first device the SliMP3). They’re a great company with a great team building really neat devices. But at the end of the day they really play at different places in the market than Sonos. The Squeezebox is more affordable device than the Sonos and the Transporter is at the very high end really targeted at the kind of people that pay ten grand for a CD player.

So, getting back to Sonos… this is a really delightful product. Incredibly easy to setup. I managed to configure a multi-room solution with Rhapsody, Pandora, and our own library of music in about 15 minutes and that included a round of firmware upgrades to take advantage of their latest feature (Pandora!).

The implementation of multi-room is the killer app for Sonos. It’s just flawless. I’m convinced that my home music use is going to skyrocket thanks to this. It’s also by far the best way to use Rhapsody (finally the $13/month makes sense to me). The Pandora implementation is also fantastic. I can’t wait to get back home and play with it some more.

When I moved this blog over from blogger the rationale was to gear up to tell the Pandora product story — at least my perspective on it. With our new product launch out the door, and things generally starting to quiet down here at Pandora central, I suppose I should start to make good on my threat to tell the tale. Here goes. Screaming into the void (hi mom!) and all that…

The Beginning

This story begins for me back in May of 2004.

I’d been the VP of Engineering since late 2000 at a company called Kenamea that was building a kind of AJAX framework designed to help people build rich internet applications. This was of course before these kinds of solutions had a name (Jesse James Garrett didn’t use the AJAX term publicly until Feb of 2005, nearly a year after I left Kenamea). Kenamea had been a tough road; trying to get enterprise customers to see the opportunities created by rich internet applications.

I was very ready to go to work on a consumer application and work on solving some problem that I had in my own life. As I started to think about what it was I wanted to invest myself in, I quickly came to the conclusion that it had to be something to do with music. Like many, I’d spent an unspeakable number of hours ripping and tagging my CD collection in iTunes and was left disappointed with how little that iTunes (at least in 2004) did to leverage that wealth of musical information. It seemed to me that there was a bunch of interesting opportunities around helping people connect with artists that they’d like by tapping into the iTunes-collected metadata.

So, I set to work cooking some ideas of my own about a consumer music service built around recommendation and tight integration into the iTunes “view” of the your musical taste. In the middle of this I took a trip down to Indio, CA for the ‘04 Coachella music festival (The Cure, The Pixies, and Radiohead!). In a very lucky stroke I bumped into a high school friend and I started telling him about some of my music recommendation ideas. He said “One of my good friends just went to work for a little company in Oakland that’s working on some of those same problems. You should call her.”

I did.

Pandora started out as a company called Savage Beast. The company got its start in January of 2000 founded by Tim Westergren, Will Glaser, and John Kraft. Tim was the music guy, Will was the technology guy, and John was the business guy. By the time I arrived on the scene in 2004, John was long gone and Tim had taken on the mantle of both “business guy” and “music guy.”

When I first met the Savage Beast team, there were 5 engineers, the two remaining founders, a just-hired VP of Business Development and a handful of music analysts. The were spread across two floors in a pretty miserable building in Oakland. Crammed into the tiniest spaces you can imagine.

The company had been busy building the Music Genome Project for the last 4 years and was focused on selling access to the Genome to pretty much any large consumer company that played in the music space. Tower, Best Buy, Borders, and AOL were all customers. The company had just raised its first real round of venture funding and the technical founder and CTO Will was looking for a VP of Engineering to build out and manage the engineering team as the company took on new projects post fund raising. In all honesty they were calling the position VP of Engineering, but what they really needed was an engineering manager. So goes it in the early stage startup world.

I came in for a round of interviews — it was in fact the very first company I’d talked to after deciding to leave Kenamea — and immediately fell in love with the team. A great group with a fascinating approach to the music recommendation problem. None-the-less, I was reluctant. These were the first people I’d talked to, and the actual position they were hiring for wasn’t a perfect fit for me. I’d played a strategic role at Kenamea and I wasn’t entirely sure I was ready to take a job that was 99% engineering tactics (hire the team, keep them happy, hit the release dates as promised, repeat). I was also looking for something that was a direct-to-consumer play, and they were pretty resolutely in the B2B space.

They offered me the job, and I decided to keep looking.

About six weeks went by. I went to Alaska and kayaked for 10 days with my Dad. I met with a bunch of cool early stage companies. I thought more about starting my own music recommendation company. But for some reason my thoughts kept going back to the little rag-tag team in Oakland.

Then my phone rang; it was Will again. While they’d been talking to other candidates they kept coming back to the idea that I was the right guy for the job. They made me another offer and this time I accepted. I was the new VP of Engineering at Savage Beast.

It took over four years, but at long last my disposable income is now entirely at risk to the iTunes store. Since well before the store launched in ‘03, the principal way that I listen to music at home is via a Squeezebox or a Sonos. Neither one of course can play FairPlay DRM’d tracks. As a result I’ve been pretty much completely cut off from the iTunes universe. Sure I have an iPod but the idea of buying music that wouldn’t play on my home stereo was never appealing to me. Sure I understand that I could go through the whole burn-re-rip thing but who wants to deal with that. So throughout the entire digital music revolution I’ve been buying CD’s from Amazon. With the launch of DRM-free tracks on iTunes today I can finally purchase digital music. So far, even with just one label on board, it’s been an expensive shift — I’ve bought 4 full albums so far. I’m sure if there were other labels available I’d have bought more. I know I’m far from the typical music consumer, but this really is a game-changer for me.

The big news in music web-dom today is the CBS acquisition of Last.fm. I’ve frequently talked about my affection for last, and I really am happy to see them “exit” at a valuation that should be good for the entire team. Last is truly remarkable at getting great features out into their communities hands. It’s a great site with tons of really interesting content and conversations. I wish them continued success as they move into their latest chapter.

We weren’t the only company to announce a platform last week. I’ll leave it to others to judge the importance of our announcement, but the more I look at what Facebook has done the more I become convinced that this is very big news, and an incredibly smart play.

The whole idea that the web needs a social platform feels very right to me. It’s ridiculous to have to re-create your social network on each and every site you encounter (flickr, linkedin, flixster, last.fm, and on and on). To have Facebook step forward and say “ok, we’re the open social network platform, come deploy your apps here against our plumbing” feels like it addresses a very real set of consumer desire.

Sure on a philosophical level it feels like the closed nature of this is perilously close to the CompuServe/Prodigy/AOL pre-Internet days and I do hope that there’s a day where some kind of open standard for these kinds of social connections solves the problem in a truly open way (FOAF++?) but until then I think Facebook has nailed it. And with 28MM engaged users they have exactly the momentum they need to be successful. I think there’s a good chance we’ll all look back at last Thursday’s announcement as the moment when Facebook truly stepped into their $2B shoes. Frankly, I suspect they’re already worth quite a bit more than that.

I think the interesting question is what happens to all the niche social networks? Sure, they can all move into a new home inside Facebook, but they’ll have to be careful to maintain some element of protectable IP. Let’s say for example that you’re a community focused around the love of movies. You move into Facebook with the new platform and start growing by leaps and bounds. How do you differentiate yourself from others with access to the same content (movie reviews, etc)? Seems tricky. Let’s say you go it on your own (don’t give your community over to the Facebook world), then how do you get people into your network? I sure would rather use a movie “app” that was deeply integrated into Facebook platform than one that wasn’t. Seems like a tricky place to be as a vertical social network. If you plug in you risk losing your real value (your network) but if you try to stay outside you miss out on the what I think will be a viral machine the likes of which we’ve not seen before. Sure seems that the social networking scene may turn out to be a winner takes all kind of situation. Should be fun to watch how all this plays out.

Well the event tonight went really well - we certainly had a great time - and the news is out:

Gizmodo

TechCrunch

TechCrunch on the Zing/Pandora Prototype

Scoble

GigaOm

PC Magazine

San Francisco Chronicle

And here is the news in our own words:

The Pandora Everywhere Platform

Pandora for Sprint

Pandora for Sonos

Pandora Website Redesign