Jon Kraft

Jon Kraft is an American business executive and co-founder and former CEO of Pandora Media, Inc. He also co-founded Thrively, LiftOff, Big Stage Entertainment, and Stanford Technology Group. Kraft has worked for a number of technology companies including, Oracle Corporation, CoreObjects Software, Ubermedia, and Auryn, Inc. He currently serves as the Chairman of Thrively, managing partner of LiftOff LLC, and CEO of MuMo, Inc.

Early life and education Kraft grew up on the lower east side of Manhattan, in New York City.

Career

Oracle Corporation From 1989 to 1992, he worked for Oracle Corporation as a Senior Technical Analyst.

Pandora Media

In 1999, Jon Kraft, along with Will Glaser and Tim Westergren, founded Pandora Media as Savage Beast Technologies in Oakland, California with the idea of The Music Genome Project. 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 to organize music and attempt to predict a person's musical taste based on a small musical sampling, This software is covered by United States Patent No. 7,003,515.

Since Pandora In 2002, Kraft joined CoreObjects Software and served as the Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing until 2005.

In 2006, 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."

In 2010, Kraft co-founded UberMedia, an independent developer of social mobile applications; and, from 2010 to 2012, he served as Chief Operating Officer.

In 2012, he co-founded Thrively.

In 2023, he joined ExoDexa as Chief Strategy Officer and head of corporate development.