In the football world, the dreaded vote of confidence from the directors’ board is often a sign that a manager is on the way out. For personal radio service Slacker, it’s not quite the same: A quote by investor Rho Capital’s Mark Leschly that “the team at Slacker has the full support of the board and its investors” came after the company confirmed that its current CEO Jim Cady is stepping back to be replaced by former Nintendo and Disney exec Duncan Orrell-Jones. With layoffs last Autumn, Slacker has been under scrutiny in recent months, but its new boss is striking a positive note. “The product is there. The engagement is growing. We have a number of core partnerships for distribution in place. Now, it’s building on that and executing,” he tells Billboard. Meanwhile, Cady – who’ll remain a director – claims that Slacker has enough financial runway to survive beyond the end of 2014. “We are not trying to explode and burn through money. We want to be more prudent,” he says. Slacker says it added 21m net new listeners last year, with between 500,000 and 1m people paying for its premium service.
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Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…