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Join Michael Levin in this Swampcast interview with Tim Westergren, Pandora CEO. Click here to listen. Photo credit: Gala
In 2007, Tim started touring the USA giving presentations about a new music service on the web called Pandora. I met Tim in Orlando. There's quite a bit of background about Pandora that Tim describes in this interview. He deferred to his CTO, Tom Conrad when I asked him about technical details. Tom and I did a Swampcast interview shortly after this one.
From Wikipedia:
"Westergren was born in 1965 in Minneapolis. He attended boarding school, Cranbrook Kingswood, during his high school years. He graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in political science.[2] Following his graduation, Westergren spent twenty years working as a record producer and composer (working as a nanny in between jobs), devoting the majority of his time to emerging artists and independent labels.
In 1999 he started Pandora Media along with two co-founders: Will Glaser and Jon Kraft. The Oakland, Calif., company went public in 2011,[3] reporting $138 million in revenue that fiscal year.
As an early project, Westergren and Glaser created the Music Genome Project, a mathematical algorithm to organize music.[1] As the company's chief strategy officer, Westergren spends the majority of his time traveling the nation and gathering feedback from Pandora Radio users. In 2010 he was listed by Time magazine as one among the 100 most influential people in the world.[4]
In April 2016, Pandora Media announced that Tim Westergren would replace Brian McAndrews as CEO. He had previously served as CEO and president from May 2002 to July 2004.[5]
In June 2017, he announced that he is going to step down as CEO.[6]"
Codetown is a social network. It's got blogs, forums, groups, personal pages and more! You might think of Codetown as a funky camper van with lots of compartments for your stuff and a great multimedia system, too! Best of all, Codetown has room for all of your friends.
Created by Michael Levin Dec 18, 2008 at 6:56pm. Last updated by Michael Levin May 4, 2018.
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As QCon San Francisco (Nov 17-21, 2025) approaches, the conference's program committee and track hosts are sharing their top picks from this year's lineup. Their selections span a wide range of topics, from AI-accelerated development and platform engineering to resilience patterns and career growth, all with QCon's signature focus on real-world case studies and lessons learned.
By Artenisa ChatziouTeena Idnani explains how to architect and build resilient event-driven distributed systems in a multi-cloud reality. Using a fictional bank's migration journey, she shares practical, code-level solutions for overcoming major challenges: managing cross-cloud latency, ensuring event ordering and consistency, building resilience by design, and preventing duplicate events.
By Teena IdnaniGitHub is introducing a hybrid post-quantum secure key exchange algorithm for SSH access when interacting with Git over SSH.
By Craig RisiReact 19.2 introduces new APIs and performance improvements focused on better UI control and server rendering. Key additions include the new Activity component for managing UI states without losing component state, and the useEffectEvent hook, which separates event logic from effect dependencies.
By Daniel CurtisSoftware architecture is tough because it blends coding, math, and business systems. Due to surprises, architectures tend to become irrelevant over time, Barry O'Reilly said. He presented residuality theory, where he suggested stressing naive architectures to reveal hidden “attractors” in complex business systems. This allows designs to better survive change and uncertainty.
By Ben Linders
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