Sauderites, I would like to pass on Westergren’s words to you. “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.”

When I was going through business articles the other day, Pandora, an Internet radio service, has caught my eyes. Pandora is a company that streams music and provides recommendations to its users. Their music playlists are often found to be very favorable and accurate to each individual’s preference. This is because Pandora uses real humans to compose them. The system is known as the Musical Genome project and is introduced by Tim Westergren, a musician and the founder of the company.

The way it works is that Pandora hires trained musicologists to sit down at a computer and identify 450 unique characteristics of each song and use this information to insert into a complex algorithm song by song. The process is too difficult and time consuming. No entrepreneurs would have thought of starting such a business in the 2000s when technology could pretty much do everything. However, Westergren ignored all those criticism and therefore kept failing with what he did.

Back then, investors didn’t believe in him because they thought using real musicians would be slow and stupid. However, after so many struggles and after pushing his idea 348 times to investors, Westergren finally found the support. As Pandora’s customers grew, its users database grew allowing the system to be more accurate. Today, Pandora gains its place at the top of music streaming industry with more than 250 million subscribers.

In my opinion, Westergren’s ignorance was the reason for his success. I believe that many businesses that had failed earlier could’ve achieved the same success if they hadn’t given up so early in the game. Remember, your idea might sound crazy and get rejected several times, but it might be the actual one needed. So keep pursuing, one day at a time, and you might find yourself to be the next Pandora!

: )

http://www.pandora.com/about/mgp

http://www.fastcolabs.com/3028215/will-pandora-survive-the-streaming-music-boom