Snapchat hires Pandora veteran as vice president of product

Snapchat this week hired a Pandora veteran as its new vice president of product, a high-profile addition to an executive team that has become something of a revolving door.

Tom Conrad, who most recently served as chief technology officer at the streaming music site, will join the Venice start-up, Snapchat confirmed Thursday. Re/code was the first to report Conrad’s hiring.

The ephemeral video messaging app believed to be valued at $16 billion has recently lost a number of executives.

Jill Hazelbaker, the company’s vice president of communications and public policy, left in October for Uber. Chief Operating Officer Emily White, who joined the company from Facebook in 2014, left Snapchat after only a year and three months on the job. And Mike Randall, Snapchat’s head of revenue and another Facebook alum, resigned in January 2015 after only eight months at the company.

But those departures belie an aggressive expansion.

Snapchat, led by co-founder and Chief Executive Evan Spiegel, has doubled its workforce to about 600 employees in the last year. The company is under growing pressure to drive up revenue as it weighs going public.

Conrad wasn’t the only new hire this month. Noah Edwardsen, formerly of Symantec, was added to Snapchat’s corporate communications team.

He joins other experienced new hires at the company, including chief strategy officer Imran Khan (formerly of Credit Suisse) and vice president of finance and acting chief financial officer Drew Vollero, who had previously worked at Mattel Inc. and Yum! Brands.

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