None of the employees that stuck it out were entitled to equity or bonuses as a result of their steadfastness.Įach employee had a choice. That claim is dubious at best, but it has also never been disputed so take that however you want.Īt the end of the two years, the employees received their entire backpay in one lump sum. This is something Westgreen has claimed not to have known at the time. If you’re wondering, deferring salaries is illegal in California, where Pandora operates. After that, Pandora was finally able to secure another round of funding. In the end, Pandora employees went with a deferred salary for two years. A week went by, and he gave that same speech. But, he said, if they could just hold on a little bit without pay, there was potential to change the world. Believing deeply in the project, co-founder Tim Westgreen got in front of his employees and told them he couldn’t pay them. In 2001, Pandora Radio ran through their initial funding of 2 million dollars. That occasionally comes through in my writing and I like it that way. Yet the web is a lifelong passion and I do love it and I have hopes for what I believe it can be. I try my best to bring truth to the history of the web because I think that project is worthwhile. I wouldn’t consider myself a great historian. A great historian can masterfully weave their ideology into their text, letting it act as a guide without overpowering the facts of the past. The bias of our objective history textbooks is made plain through what’s included and, even more importantly, what is not in the text. But no history and no historian is without an ideology. There’s a myth we’re taught about history. I also learned how to filter bias from my own writing. How to filter bias from the histories that I read. Back in college though, I learned how to do research how to follow secondary sources to primary sources and draw connections between them. Instead, I coded websites and that led to a career that I love and am grateful for. I never quite made it to true academic status. Parsing out this particular story about Pandora gives me a unique opportunity to pull back the curtain and talk about how I do my research and how I chose to write the stories that I write.Īs an added bonus, I get to make a slightly bigger deal about a practice I find deeply troubling. I’ve been doing this long enough that it’s not often I’m confronted with something that a) I’m not familiar with and b) brings to light reasonable ethical and ideological concerns. I mentioned it briefly in my post, but I want do a bit more than that. This is not something I ever heard before, even in passing. Pandora deferred the salaries of its employees for over two years in the early 2000’s after it ran out of funding. Let’s start with something I learned doing research for my last post: Take a look here.ĬNET Magazine: Check out a sampling of the stories you'll find in CNET's newsstand edition, right here.When I look at a story, sometimes I have to look past the history that has already been written to find the truth that was hiding behind it. Pandora didn't immediately respond to a request for further information.īatteries Not Included: The CNET team shares experiences that remind us why tech stuff is cool. Its stock was up more than 7 percent in after-hours trading to $12 a share. Pandora said it expects to exceed previously announced guidance for the fourth quarter when it reports its financial results on Feb. The company had also held talks a year ago about selling itself and was working with Morgan Stanley to line up potential buyers, sources tell The New York Times. The job cuts come a little more than a month after it was reported that Pandora was interested in selling itself to one-time suitor Sirius XM. Pandora, the internet's largest streaming-music service, is feeling the pinch as listeners move toward rivals such as Spotify and Apple Music, which allow on-demand listening to specific tracks. "While making workforce reductions is always a difficult decision, the commitment to cost discipline will allow us to invest more heavily in product development and monetization and build on the foundations of our strategic investments," Pandora CEO Tim Westergren said in a statement. The music-streaming service had 2,219 employees as of the end of 2015, according to Reuters, meaning the job cuts will eliminate about 155 positions. The Oakland, California-based company said it expects to complete the layoffs in the first quarter of 2017 as part of a cost-cutting measure. Pandora said Thursday it plans to shave 7 percent off its workforce in a move that may make the internet radio giant more appealing to prospective buyers.
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