Tim Westergren

Tim Westergren changed the radio and music streaming industry forever when he formed Pandora Media in 2000. Now serving as its Chief Strategy Officer, Tim takes to the stage as an entrepreneurial keynote speaker using his story of rejection and failure as inspiration for audiences to see just what is possible when you have a dream.

An award-winning composer, accomplished musician and a record producer with 20 years of experience in the music industry, Tim looks back on his experiences as a composer which led to the inspiration that became Pandora Media. In the past, Tim needed to learn very specific musicial tastes each director had, using the vague clues given to create a piece of music which the director wanted. His experience became the motivation to invent a better method for predicting what a listener would want to hear based on the musical characteristics of what that user already liked.

To help predict musical tastes, Tim and his Pandora co-founders Will Glaser and Jon Kraft conceived and developed the Music Genome Project. The algorithm they eventually developed had over 450 attributes (or genes) to describe and organize songs. Their collaboration led to Pandora Media.

In 1999, Pandora Media was founded and went public in 2011. In addition to guiding Pandora’s overall strategy and vision, Tim served as Pandora’s CEO and chief evangelist—traveling the country to meet with listeners to collect feedback, researching local music, and spreading the word of the Music Genome Project. Tim stepped down as CEO in 2017.

Tim graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in political science and is an accomplished jazz pianist. Tim recently became a venture partner with Khosla ventures.

Tim's huge experience within the music industry, supplemented with the inspirational tale that is Pandora Media, makes him a keynote speaker with a message that will stay long in the memory of audiences.