I interviewed with one of them, and they picked a fight with me about advertising because I felt my previous employer had taken the absolute lowest possible road. I continually tried to acquiesce, even noting that they had a paid option, and they basically said that they hate their paid customers, who they lose money on (why not charge us more?!?), and that they only ever did a paid option because they were forced to.

Pretty sure I had been using their fucking service longer than anyone I interviewed with there, but whatever. ;)

That's interesting. Their Boulder office contacted me earlier this year about an interview, and I felt it would have been a pointless exercise since they'd fallen so far behind their competition (iTunes/Apple, Spotify, Grooveshark) that innovation and quality would take a back seat to revenue. Having just left a job at MapQuest (which is well on a similar advertising-driven downward spiral), I just declined and haven't heard anything further.

Glad to hear an anecdote that confirms I made the right read on that.

Fuck Pandora. They use to have a mission. Nowadays they've even given up on the vaunted Music Genome project in order to play more "hits" and shove in more advertising.

If the startup is venture backed, the mission is creating shareholder value. The rest is just lip service. You should know as much too.

Your skepticism for the bigger companies is certainly just. My comments are more inclined to smaller start-ups like GoldieBlox and Qeyno.

There's lots of little startups with lofty goals wherever you look. I don't think Watsi[1] means anything in particular for the character of San Francisco.

[1]: or twitter for that matter, though I'm sure no one will agree with me