Making Easy Money

Wednesday, nearly eleven years after Tim Westergen and his colleagues started Pandora, it began trading on the public markets. I posted a blog post on the news, and suddenly was overcome by emotion, tearing up a little as I thought about Westergen who has been through hell and back as the founder of this company. His story is no different from any entrepreneur who dares to try to capture lightning in a bottle – but it is one with a happy ending.

There are two ways of looking at Pandora. You could look at through the lens of a life-long skeptical reporter who cannot reconcile the valuation of the company with its business reality — and there are many who are doing exactly that. The other extreme view is to look at it from the point of view of a startup founder, one who has been through his or her own ups and downs. I will let the skeptic take the day off for today. To me, Pandora’s story is about hope.

A Savage Beast

I remember meeting the Pandora team days after my former Red Herring colleague Alex Gove, then at Walden VC, introduced me to Larry Marcus (partner at WaldenVC and an investor in Pandora)  and Westergen. The company was at that time called The Savage Beast and was building a music-genome project. Being a reporter who normally focused on the nuts and bolts of the Internet, I didn’t much care for the company, but I liked Westergen.

Over the years, he and I stayed in touch. The boom turned to bust and what was an idealistic quest turned into a journey over burning coals, with constant rejections and a test of faith. He has bobbed, he has weaved, he has pivoted –- and he has survived.

After all these years, and many rounds of funding, Westergen is not making billions of dollars, as many would assume – in fact, he owns a miniscule share of the company: 2.39 percent, which is worth just over $60 million at the closing price of $2.8 billion, a fraction of the money his investors are making. Something isn’t right about that, but that is the way of the world.

Can’t Buy Me Love

I know Westergen and I don’t think he started Savage Beast/Pandora for money anyway. All these years, he has been the same guy. A pair of jeans, a simple t-shirt, plain old sneakers and a bag slung across his shoulders –- and more importantly, an easy smile and willingness to believe that things will get better, if only he could fight for one more day. He did Pandora for one reason: love.

He loved the idea of building a music genome. Eventually the company figured out what the business model would be — and the team there will figure out profits as well. Most startups come from love, not a desire to make pots of money.

These days, it is commonplace to lionize the amount of money a start-up snags from venture-capital investments or billion-dollar valuations some investors place on a company and the insanity of the public markets. Nothing annoys me more than “money” defining one’s convictions. The world unfortunately tends to focus on the destination, not the journey undertaken. And raising money or the public markets are those destinations.

I often joke with my friends that startups are like climbing sheer rock without any support, always slipping a few feet, and then gaining an inch. It is that inch you climb that brings immense joy, even if it is short-lived. The rest is just fighting to stay alive, trying to get ahead and just getting it down.

Rejection shapes us as much as the positive news. Just ask Tim! Or Reid Hoffman! Ask them about how many times venture capitalists rejected their quest for investment dollars. Just because twenty investors reject the idea of a social network for professionals doesn’t mean that it is a bad idea or it is wrong -– it is just an idea that the world doesn’t quite understand yet.

Being a real entrepreneur is a long, lonely road as Tim’s journey tells us. Creating something that is lasting — something you love — takes time. Often a very long time! But in the end, the journey is worth it.

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Washington Post Managing Editor Explains Why Focusing On Direct Revenue From Consumers Is Short-Sighted

from the free-is-expensive,-but-it-can-pay-off dept

From the title of this article in Forbes, by Raju Narisetti, the managing editor of the Washington Post, you might think it was going to be another rant against "free" online and talk up the wonders of paywalls. After all, the article is called "Why Free is Very Expensive." But, the article actually is much more nuanced, and effectively explains why folks at The Washington Post think that a paywall doesn't really make much sense:

Here is why revenue from readers is unlikely to be our salvation.



-- A metered model makes your business susceptible to the will of a few readers--those who consume the most articles/pages. Often, less than 5% of these kinds of visitors account for nearly 50% of your page views. And they have very little barriers to exit.



-- Aggregators, like Huffington Post, will still find ways to deliver your content for free and often with more engaging technologies since they don't have to invest much in content creation.



-- The infrastructure for payment systems, data security, customer service, reader acquisition and retention for digital subscriptions costs a bundle to build and run, yet your consumer price points need to be low, making the return on investment a clear challenge.



-- Our Web sites were to be trusted safe havens protecting, informing and entertaining you amid a deluge of digital content. And when you came to us, we would make money off you. But that was before your friends became your trusted sources. There are 600 million of you on Facebook and we know we need to be there too with our content. We haven't even begun to fathom that monetization challenge. So, we could up end an expensive drawbridge around Web sites that are already losing their value?



-- Scrolling on Web sites has always been a poor experience for consuming news. Now, just as new devices and digital experiences--none invented by major news brands--create richer engagement outside our sites, we are talking about charging readers for sub-optimal Web site consumption.

He does point out, as everyone agrees, that it is costly to run a major modern news operation, and that the digital business models for large publications like the one he works for haven't kept pace. But, thankfully, unlike some of his competitors, he wants to look forward and not backwards. He's looking at the ways large successful internet companies are making more and more money by increasing convenience and building more value for users:

I, for one, think that the golden age of targeted digital advertising is yet to come. Do we really want to trade that larger opportunity for the much smaller and unreliable pursuit of consumer dollars? I also wonder if we aren't better off redeploying our newsroom resources to create new revenue streams and more engaging digital platforms than trying to make the traditional Web experience better and charge for it....



Free is indeed very expensive. But, what the prolonged and knee-jerk debate about free vs. paid inside our news organizations shows is that we still have what led us here in the first place: An imagination deficit. Rather than apply an �all or nothing' approach focused, perhaps wrongly, on just our Web sites, we should be willing to make creative bets on our business model. We continue to make what is being consumed--in large quantities. It is time we figured out how to make it easier, more engaging and useful. Despite their soaring valuations, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter don't create much, if anything at all, by way of original content. And, for that matter, neither do Google or YouTube. They simply make it easy, useful and engaging to their audiences. These are incredibly disruptive times and one thing is clear to me: There isn't time or room for incrementalism at major news organizations.

It's nice to finally see someone at a major publication recognize this point that many of us have been making for a while. For all the talk of paywalls, there's been very little done to actually increase the value of the online experience for users at these newspaper sites. There's been very little effort to build and support community. It's nice to see that at least one major paper is hopefully moving in that direction.

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