Time Horizons at our 10-Year Mark

We have just crossed the ten-year mark since Pandora’s launch (and fifteen since our founding as Savage Beast Technologies). There will be plenty of celebrating around Pandora’s 39 offices over the next few days. It’s a major milestone we are all proud of. Few companies born in the early 2000s have lived to say those words.

The company has changed enormously – several times over in fact. And on this occasion I find myself trying to articulate the difference between the company I know today, with over 1700 employees, and the one we started around my dining room table. It’s not just that we’re bigger.

The best way for me to capture it is the way we have evolved to operating on multiple time horizons – looking not just to the next day, but also to the future.

Startups are all about getting to the next day. It’s scrappy, improvisational and completely tactical. Then, as you emerge from that period: establishing a sustainable core business and building out your team and operational capacity, you create the ability to start thinking about other, longer-term stuff. The introduction of this new ingredient is a fundamental transition for a company.

This inflection point hit us around 2012. It was then that we began talking about building a “hundred year company.” And when it came to longer-term focus, our attention pretty quickly gravitated to our employees. Specifically, creating a company that could attract and retain the very best talent. That is the only way to build a great, lasting company. The two themes that took front and center in that endeavor were purpose and culture; Establishing our “true North” in terms of what we were trying to accomplish, along with a clear set of beliefs about the kind of company we want to be for people who work here. If you get those right, you’ll be able to build and sustain a great team.

Continuing to excel at the daily execution while building the organizational and cultural frame for a much bigger company is tricky. They are two very different muscles, and I’ve come to believe that the key for the adolescent company is figuring out how to excel at both simultaneously.

This is what I think really distinguishes the Pandora of today from its younger self. We’ve managed to sustain operational excellence, while also developing our long-term muscle. Ask any Pandora employee and I’m pretty sure they have a shared understanding of our purpose and culture. They know why we’re here, and they know what we care about internally and externally.  With those well in hand, I feel confident the next ten years will be even better than the last…and that’s saying something!