Pandora Promotes David Gerbitz to Chief Operating Officer

Music streaming service Pandora has promoted David Gerbitz, who previously served as the company’s executive VP of revenue operations, to the chief operating officer (COO) role. Gerbitz is replacing former COO Sara Clemens, who left the company in December 2016 and was later hired as COO at Twitch.

Gerbitz joined Pandora in July of 2014, according to his Linkedin profile. He previously worked at Yahoo, most recently as VP of global mid market and SMB sales. Before that, Gerbitz worked for close to a decade for Microsoft.

Gerbitz’s promotion comes as Pandora is going through a restructuring that includes layoffs of around 5% of its workforce — a step that is meant to help the company save $45 million annually. The company also shift some of its efforts from Oakland, Calif. to Atlanta, where it hopes to hire less expensive talent.

CEO Roger Lynch recently told Variety that Pandora had to execute better to be successful. “We have the best collection of assets in the business. We under-leveraged them in the past,” he said. Lynch also said that Pandora would be adding more podcasts to its streaming service, and outlined plans to build what he called “the equivalent of the podcast genome project.”

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