Tom Conrad

We never spent any money on paid user acquisition, literally no dollars in the entire time I was there, because people loved the product and they told their friends about it and that's how it grew.

It is really, really powerful to spend the time to create the model that describes the whole thing so you can identify what are the high leverage points to focus on.

There's this belief that everybody needs to be a founder. I think, in some ways, our industry would be much better off if there were fewer founders. There's an entire category of smart, creative, hardworking, talented, borderline visionary people who can raise that $2 million seed and go off and build some stupid company that's never going to go anywhere. That would be so much better off finding a team that needs their skillset and working on a problem that has a mathematical formula that's going to win on any metric.

When we launched the support@pandora.com was an alias for all@pandora.com. So if you sent a customer service request to Pandora, every single person in the company received it. And because we made a decision to have no customer support team in the first year, the expectation was that whoever sees the request first should respond to it. And so you would write to us and you would get the founder or you'd get me or you'd get the engineer who wrote the feature or you'd get the CEO.

Every single time I've taken a job where it turned out that I was working with people who had a different set of values or working styles than I had, I knew. You tell yourself that, at least in my case, I tell myself a story about why the thing I suspect might be the case isn't the case.