Spence: Sonos rejected making $29 speakers to compete with Amazon and Google
Patrick Spence · 20VC: Sonos CEO Patrick Spence on His Biggest Lessons Building and Growing Blackberry, The Right Way to View Competition and Innovation Cycles & How To Make The Transition From COO To CEO Most Effectively · Feb 26, 2021 · at 10:55
Patrick Spence, CEO of Sonos, explains how learning from RIM's mistake with the BlackBerry Storm convinced him not to copy Amazon's and Google's cheap smart speaker pucks.
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“My experience from RIM led me to believe, no, that's exactly what we shouldn't do. We're not going to respond in that way. We're going to build on what we do, which is an open platform. And we're going to take the most useful part of those products, which is the voice experience. And we're going to implement those in our own way on Sonos products, right? And continue to build on the Sonos premium experience.”
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More from Patrick Spence
Spence: BlackBerry Storm ruined ten years of RIM's reputation in one weekend
“We basically took 10 years of building an amazing reputation for reliability, quality, And create experience and threw it out of the window over the course of a weekend when we first launched storm and a whole bunch of people had a really bad experience.”
Sonos is suing Google while actively maintaining product partnerships with them
“We're suing Google right now. But at the same time, we still work with them on YouTube Music Service, on Google Assistant, and some of these other areas”
Spence: Diversity initiatives fail unless directly driven by the CEO
“I think the real issue is in those cases, they've often siloized it or given it as a responsibility to somebody else. When I think this is something that is about talent and about culture and something that the CEO really needs to own and drive.”
BlackBerry Messenger had 80M daily active users before WhatsApp gained traction
“BlackBerry Messenger at that point was eighty million daily active users. This is before WhatsApp had any traction, any other iMessage had much Attraction”
Spence: Authentic, vulnerable leadership yields greater results with less mental overhead
“And I've realized there is way more power as a leader in being vulnerable and just being who you are and leading in that way. And it comes with a lot less mental overhead too, in terms of being able to show up like just as yourself.”
Founder John MacFarlane left Sonos' board completely when Spence became CEO
“John McFarland stepped away completely. So unlike most founders and CEOs and large shareholders that maybe go onto the board or become executive chairman or something like that, John said, no, I've seen how this works and goes badly at many companies.”