Think you’re persuasive enough to convince 50 of your employees to work for two years without pay? Probably not. Well that’s exactly what Tim Westergren, the founder of Pandora, managed to pull out. How? By giving one helluva pump up speech.
Pandora was founded in 2000 with about $2m in funding. However in 2001 the company ran out of money. Unwilling to giving up, Westergren had to figure out how to keep his 50-person team from quitting. They had yet to launch their product and were years away from making money.
So how did Westergren do it? Every two weeks, when it was time to hand out the paychecks that he went into credit card debt to afford, Westergren gave his this-startup-is-a-rocket-ship-get-on-board speech.
At Hustle Con 2015, Westergren recited the speech he regularly gave that convinced his team to defer their salary until Westergren was able to get more funding.
Here it is:
Here’s his answer: