Sandy’s small presence in a big world

Last week Tim Westergren, the CEO of Pandora, came to speak at MIT Sloan. I have been a huge fan of Pandora ever since it launched 2,3 years ago so it was exciting to meet the man behind it.

Pandora

When I want to listen to new and good music, I go to Pandora (here’s my Pandora profile). It’s simple and it really works. Just last week, after the talk, I told Ting about the site and she wrote me later gushing about her addiction to her Kelly Clarkson channel (Kelly Clarkson? hmph). I haven’t found anybody who didn’t love the site once they’ve tried it!

From Tim’s talk, I found that after all these years Pandora’s music “engine” is still powered by the human ear. This is pretty interesting since not long ago I was just having a discussion with some one who thought Pandora must have figured out a better way to automate and scale its database by now. Well, I got it straight from the horse’s mouth: of the 120-ish employees at Pandora, 50 of them are “musicologists” who sit around all day long listening to new songs and rating them based on 400+ dimensions. It takes ~15-45 minutes to analyze each song. Tim joked about taking great pains to beat the personal bias out of musicologists to get an objective analysis - I had a vision of a poor struggling musician being locked in a tiny room listening to crappy techno all day long. He also defended Pandora on not factoring in social context and popular opinion - the phrase he used was it “eliminates social snobbery”.

He gave an anecdote of a user who emailed him - upset that on his “Enya” channel, a Celine Dion song - with a rather cheesy reputation - showed up. After a few back and forth emails, the man concluded, “Oh my gosh. I’m a Celine Dion fan!”

I suppose that’s a pretty good argument and directly contradicts some of the other recommendation analysis engines out there such as The Echo Nest, which purports using sentiment analysis of a song or artist on the blogosphere. I still think if there was a way to automate the music analysis portion of the business Pandora could scale its database a lot better.

On Music Subscription

Tim also stated that he doesn’t believe in music subscription services because 1) it’s “not the way people are use to paying for music.” This point I don’t agree with since I am the kind of person who would pay for subscription music. The radio is great but I also want control and access to a large library. 2) He also referred to the regulatory hurdle related to on-demand subscription service as a deterrent - each song has to be individually negotiated, thus making it impossible to have a large database of songs. On the other hand radio play requires just one RIAA license.

On Tim

I think above all I liked Tim’s personal story as a struggling musician turned entrepreneur. He’s a great story teller and has a ton of self-deprecating charm - taking us through Pandora’s early struggles (and even getting sued by employees by giving them IOU’s!) to its eventual popularity.

Getting a SlingBox was simply the best purchase decision I made in the last 3 months, especially as a frequent traveler. Technically it’s a gift for Henry but I seem to be reaping the rewards (typical Sandy gift buying strategy). Now that it’s connected to his DVR in New York, I can catch up on Project Runaway and Top Chef or watch a football game from anywhere with an internet connection… pretty sweet eh?

Once before Henry has gotten the mobile SlingPlayer working on his Samsung BlackJack, but no longer since the trial expired and it costs $29.99 - shame on Sling Media.

In fact, I look forward to the day we don’t even need to stream from home and take up unnecessary bandwidth. Instead we’d just stream from a central server or even peer-to-peer to get better quality.

One day I was talking to Peter at Prism Venture about how he came to pick out Justin and I from the resumes he received through the MIT Externship Program. I believe it when Bong said they got a ton of applications for the externship since Venture Capital is the industry du jour amongst MBA’s and I couldn’t imagine an investment sector with wider appeal than consumer internet.

He said:

1) He wanted to find students with engineering/computer science backgrounds because yadda yadda… Sounds reasonable enough.
2) He looked favorably on consulting and startup experience: one to be presentable and ramp up in a short period of time. Two… startup experience is obviously directly related to a fund investing in early stage companies.
3) He filtered the remaining candidates by checking them out on FaceBook, LinkedIn, etc. Power users: good. No friends: bad. You’d be surprised at how many people didn’t even have a FaceBook account…

Thus, time spent on Facebook petting my elephant Kokiri… hey at least it got me this internship!

First semester of bschool zipped by in the blink of an eye. Right now I am on a plane from Taipei to San Francisco to meet up with Henry and spend New Years with my friends from Berkeley. The terrible twitch in my eye has prevailed throughout my visit to Taiwan despite ample sleep and intake of B-complex vitamins. The high strung pace of first semester lingers in the muscles of my eye, as if I needed any more reminder that interviews are right around the corner.

The High-School Years

Last night I attended my 10 year high-school reunion. It’s quite incredible how people I haven’t seen for a decade some how are still the same as ever. It was as if coming back from a really long summer vacation. I dare not think about all the things I wish I had the courage, discipline, and foresight to do back when I was 18. Instead I review my new favorite concept of sunk cost in my head and focus on what lies ahead. I regret not maintaining better contact with some of these people, others I am grateful they are still in my life.

The College Years

Now I’m retracing my steps from Taiwan to the Bay Area to see those precious college buddies. Then, to LA to do an externship at Prism VentureWork for three weeks before finally head back to Boston. I have a feeling that’s exactly when my eyes will rest in peace.

When every one on the team has a Mac, video conferencing goes from idea to reality. Yesterday my Victoria’s Secret retail lab team successfully used the multiuser video conference to conduct a meeting in the comfort of our homes. At first when it was just Ting and I on in the call, the voice/video quality was honestly impressive. As more members joined in, the quality did degrade quite a bit - especially when multiple people tried to speak or there was background noise. There’s still room to improve the software to deal with these user environment issues and unstable network bandwidth.

Talking bras and panties is so much more fun and effective when you can see each other’s face.

The new iChat with the switchable backgrounds looks great but I haven’t found time to backup everything before installing Leopard. The copy of Leopard is still sitting on my desk… for when I have the time! hopefully soon.

Ah, Halloween. This year I continued the tradition of dressing up as a cartoon/anime character. My accomplice is Stewie from the Family Guy - easily recognizable and wildly popular. Unfortunately, no one seemed to know who I was suppose to be… poor little Madeline:

Madeline and her dog:

Now that I’ve done Sailor Moon, Asuka Langley from Evangelion, and Madeline, I need ideas for next year. HELP!