1.) Who are you? What do you do?
A: I’m Dan Lythcott-Haims and I’m the Creative Director at Pandora. Pandora is personalized internet radio. It gives you a way to create a radio station based on music that you like and the ability to discover new music. We’re on mobile, we’re on the web, we’re on consumer electronic devices and this year we’re finally in the car.
2.) Out of curiosity are you partnering with a specific car company?
A: We’re built into Ford’s Sync system, plus Pioneer and Alpine after-market units. They all require hooking up to your phone; your iPhone or android on 3g. There’s a special version of the Pandora app that can be controlled from the stereo head units.
3.) Tell us about your career path. How did you get to Creative Director of Pandora?
A: I started out in my career designing exhibits for science and history museums. I worked for a couple consulting firms and learned a ton about how to design for people. In museums you have all different types of visitors: everything from the school kids who come in as a group and aren’t that interested to the grandparents who are bringing in their grandkids. How do you create an exhibit that sort of works for everybody? How do you catch their attention? How do you explain a very complex issue like orbital mechanics, if you’re talking about space flight, and make something interesting for kids and adults at the same time? So I learned a lot about how to design for users.
Then for awhile I went freelance. I was working for myself doing mostly graphic design but a little bit of exhibit work and some product design. That’s when clients started asking for websites. Clients would ask me if I could design websites for them. When you’re freelancing, the answer to any question is always yes. So, I taught myself how to do that. I just naturally applied what I had learned from museum design about designing for the user. So my first question when designing these sites was always, “Who is it for?” not “What are you selling?”
I worked freelance for a while and that’s when we had our first child. That allowed me to work part time pretty easily. But I was never very good at marketing or selling myself and getting clients, so it was a struggle. An opportunity came along to join a startup in the educational content world (back when you could get money to start anything). I joined them as an information architect figuring out how the information on a webpage should be laid out and what goes where. That company eventually ran out money and was starting to go under. It was right then that I got a call from my friend, Tim Westergren. He said “I’m starting this company and I’m ready for you to come work for me.”
In both companies I made it clear from the very beginning that I would be working part time. That was just the deal. As you might imagine, not everybody was comfortable with that. These were people in startup mode. They’re working eighty hours a week and here comes someone that’s only working part time. What does part time mean for a startup? I was just clear on the hours that I had to give. But I work efficiently and I’m good at what I do. I’m not going to sit and screw around. They ultimately took a chance on it and I’ve been Creative Director at Pandora now for ten years. I feel very, very lucky that I’ve been able to work on something this interesting on my own terms and succeed at it.
4.) What are the most inspiring aspects of your job?
A: Right now the most inspiring part is building a product that consumers really enjoy. We toiled in obscurity for many, many years. The company started out as Savage Beast, and then we became Pandora. In either case when I would tell people where I worked they would say “What? What is that?” Now, I sit around and I have a conversation with strangers and they say “Oh, that’s cool, I love Pandora!” and that’s a rush. It’s kind of shallow, but given that I’ve spent my career designing for people it’s great to finally be at a place where lots of people enjoy your products.
Even with designing museums, you may get thousands and thousands of people going through them but that’s really just a small, local population. If you design a museum in North Carolina, maybe a hundred thousand people in North Carolina have seen it. Now I get to design something for a broad swath of users. We have 60 million people signed up. It’s really gratifying. We’ve worked hard over the years to make it simple, interesting and to focus on getting listeners to the music. And I have to think that we’ve done something right, so that’s really gratifying.
The other thing that’s gratifying is working with very talented people. I attribute all of my success as a manager to having hired incredible people to work with me; very talented, very independent. And I just love watching the incredible work they do.
5.) Tell us more about how you’ve been able to achieve such tremendous balance with your work schedule.
A: I’ve always tried to give as much as I could to work while still maintaining my personal home requirements. We have the benefit of having my mother-in-law live with us and taking up part of the childcare responsibilities. We’ve divided up amongst the three adults and I have my responsibilities for my afternoons and my mornings and that’s not negotiable. You have to be home when the kids get home from school, you don’t want them sitting on the stoop. When they were younger, you had to pick them up at preschool. It’s kept my work time very delimited; these are the hours that I can work. And yeah, I can work evenings or I can work weekends, but I’ve always tried to avoid that if at all possible and I’ve gotten pretty good at it. I avoid it by being very efficient when I’m at work. I get stuff done and I don’t dither about it. I also plan ahead. Being very strict with myself and being very respectful of my own time has taught the people around me at work to be respectful with my time.
It’s great when we’re trying to schedule a meeting and to hear someone else say “well Dan needs to leave by one, so we need to start earlier” as opposed to me always being the one to have to say that. And that happens sometimes and it doesn’t happen other times. But it says to me that I’ve made the point that this is non-negotiable, this is important and everybody needs to realize that if they’re working with me.
But, as I was saying before, I give as much as I can so when the kids started school I bumped up from 50% to 60%-65%. Every time I can add a few more hours to it, I do. I add as much as I can without sacrificing my kids’ needs. This is a limited period of time, in 9 years my youngest goes to college and I’ll still be working for many years after that. There’ll be more work in my future.
6.) A lot of dads say their family is more important than work, but their actions say otherwise. You obviously mean it. How did you get there?
A: Well, there were some practical aspects to it when we were talking about having kids. My wife is in a profession that’s less flexible. I was working for myself at the time. It didn’t take long after discussing it to determine that of the two of us, I was the one who could be home more because I was more flexible. I was eager and ready to do that. In fact, I had talked about doing that from the time we got married. Because number one, I’m not a workaholic. I’ve never identified myself by my career. I like what I do but it’s not who I am. And I like kids. To me the whole point of having kids is to raise kids. It’s not to check it off on my resume or be able to trot them out at family reunions. It was more, won’t it be interesting to raise these little people and teach them things; play Lego with them. So I really wanted to. Practically, it was something that made sense for our family and something that I was eager to do. So when it came time to take that first job out of the home once we had kids it wasn’t a question.
7.) What brands, experiences and activities that you enjoyed as a kid do you like to share with your children?
A: Matchbox was a great thing when the kids were a little younger. I always loved things with wheels. I’m not a muscle car guy, but something has always fascinated me about the simplicity of a toy on wheels. Matchbox was just the right size and you could collect them, and you could race them, and you could smash them into each other and they didn’t get hurt. They had those great little orange ramps that you could slide them down. I had a big collection and my kids had a big collection. That’s a great product.
I think Nerf has always done great things. I have very mixed feelings about all the Nerf guns. We’ve never had guns in our house and that’s meant that we’ve never had any Nerf guns. I think they’re really cool but I won’t buy them. All of their other stuff is great though. They have somehow maintained a look and feel to their product line across all these different categories, from footballs to guns to everything in between. I just think they’ve done an excellent job.
The last thing is not a product. The last thing is the outdoors. My favorite thing to do as a kid was to go out into the woods behind my house and build bridges over the stream, build dams, float little boats down the water and pretend I was an explorer. I wish we lived in that kind of environment now so the kids could have that. But whenever possible I’ve tried to introduce the kids to that. They enjoy coming out and gardening with grandma. I wish they were more introduced to this kind of stuff. It’s not necessarily a go camping kind of thing as I’ve never really liked sleeping on the ground, but just being outside and finding cool stuff.
