Tom Conrad has joined Jeffrey Katzenberg’s Quibi to lead product and customer support, becoming the latest addition to the ambitious short-form video venture’s senior management team.
Conrad, a former Snap and Pandora exec, had been serving as a board adviser to Quibi since late last year. He was tapped as Quibi’s chief product officer last month, reporting to CEO Meg Whitman. Conrad officially stepped into the new role March 25 where he leads the company’s product design, product management, user research and customer support teams.
Conrad’s appointment comes as Quibi (a portmanteau of “quick bites”) has been steadily rounding out its executive ranks ahead of the company’s planned April 2020 launch of a mobile subscription VOD service. Bankrolled with $1 billion from investors that include major Hollywood studios, Quibi has announced a broad range of premium short-form shows — including “Frat Boy Genius,” a series about the rise of Snapchat and co-founder/CEO Evan Spiegel.
Other recent high-level Quibi hires include CAA talent agent Jim Toth, who is leading content acquisition and talent efforts, and Diane Nelson, former president of DC Entertainment, who is head of operations for content.
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Conrad, before joining Quibi, most recently was VP of product at Snap where he led the Snapchat product design teams. He left in March 2018 after two years in the job. Snapchat had broadly rolled out an app redesign in early 2018 that prompted a broad backlash among users; the company later reversed course on part of the redesign, moving Stories from a user’s friends from the chat section into the Discover section.
Prior to Snap, Conrad was co-creator of music-streaming service Pandora, where he spent a decade serving as chief technology officer and executive VP of product. Conrad started his career at Apple as an engineer on the Finder and System Software teams. He holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Michigan.
Separately, Conrad currently serves on the board of smart-speaker company Sonos, which went public last summer.