Jon Kraft is an American business executive best known as a co-founder of Pandora Media, Inc. and its former CEO. He also co-founded Thrively, LiftOff, Big Stage Entertainment and Stanford Technology Group. Additionally, he has previously worked for a number of technology companies including,

Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American Multinational corporation, multinational computer technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Co-founded in 1977 in Santa Clara, California, by Larry Ellison, who remains executive chairman, Oracle was ...

, CoreObjects Software, Ubermedia, and Auryn, Inc. He currently serves as the Chairman of Thrively, managing partner of LiftOff LLC and the Chief Executive Officer of MuMo, Inc.

Early life and education

Kraft was born in

Brooklyn Brooklyn is a Boroughs of New York City, borough of New York City located at the westernmost end of Long Island in the New York (state), State of New York. Formerly an independent city, the borough is coextensive with Kings County, one of twelv ...

and raised in

Plainview, New York Plainview is a Hamlet (New York), hamlet and census-designated place (CDP) located in the town of Oyster Bay (town), New York, Oyster Bay in east central Nassau County, New York, United States. The population of the CDP was 27,100. The Plainv ...

. He holds a

Bachelor of Arts A Bachelor of Arts (abbreviated B.A., BA, A.B. or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is the holder of a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the liberal arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts deg ...

degree from

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

. From 1989 to 1992, he worked for

as a Senior Technical Analyst.

Career

Stanford Technology Group

In 1993, Kraft started his first company, Stanford Technology Group, which developed analytical software and consulted to Fortune 500 companies on the design and implementation of large

database management systems In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and ana ...

. He served as its Vice President until it was acquired by

Informix Corporation Informix Corporation, formerly Informix Software, Inc., was a software company located in Menlo Park, California. It was a developer of relational database software for computers using the Unix, Microsoft Windows, and Apple Macintosh operating s ...

in 1995. At Informix, Kraft served as the Director of Business Development and Product Marketing for two years.

Pandora Media

In 1999 Jon Kraft along with Will Glaser and

Tim Westergren Timothy Brooks Westergren (born December 21, 1965) is a co-founder of Pandora. Biography Westergren was born in 1965 in Minneapolis. He attended boarding school, Cranbrook Kingswood, during his high school years. He graduated from Stanford Univer ...

founded

Pandora Media Pandora is a subscription-based music streaming service owned by the broadcasting corporation Sirius XM that is based in Oakland, California in the United States. The service carries a focus on recommendations based on the "Music Genome Project" ...

as Savage Beast Technologies in

Oakland, California Oakland is a city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area in the U.S. state of California. It is the county seat and most populous city in Alameda County, California, Alameda County, with a population of 440,646 in 2020. A major We ...

with the idea of The Music Genome Project, a mathematical algorithm to organize music. He served as its founding Chief Executive Officer from 2000 to 2002. He, along with the other developers, patented the Music Genome Project: software that uses a mathematical algorithm that attempts to predict a person's musical taste based on a small musical sampling, and is covered by United States Patent No. 7,003,515.

Big Stage Entertainment, Thrively and other works

In 2002, Kraft joined at CoreObjects Software and served as the Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing until 2005. He co-founded Big Stage Entertainment along with Jonathan Strietzel and Jon Snoddy and served as its Chief Operating Officer from 2006 and 2010. The company was named by Forbes in 2009 as one of “America’s 20 Most Promising Companies.” From 2010 to 2012, Kraft served as Chief Operating Officer of Ubermedia, an independent developer of social mobile applications and was a member of the founding team. He previously served as a member of advisory board at Minerals Corporation Limited since April 2016.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kraft, Jon Living people Year of birth missing (living people) Stanford University alumni Businesspeople in software American corporate directors American technology chief executives American technology company founders American information technology businesspeople American computer businesspeople Businesspeople from Los Angeles