Sonos

“We then enlisted half a dozen design partners that we built the first version of our product and platform with and for. And these are, in the history of the company, legendary, legendary companies. Olokai, great flip-flops, you should buy them. SiriusXM, Sonos…”

“Our conversations always start with, talk to us about how you behave now and how you want to behave in the future. As opposed to, tell me about your positioning. Tell me about your values. Tell me about your mission. That's really kind of old thinking. It's ve…”

“They literally have the S one app And then the Sonos app and the S one app is for older systems.”

“Sonos delivered on the hardware side. They did the hard part and then they just couldn't get the app to work, which is crazy.”

“And now they do over a billion dollars a year in business.”

“93% of Sonos speakers that sold in the last 13 years are active today.”

“It's funny because it would have been great for consumers in so many ways if Apple had acquired Sonos. Because Apple is the best in the world at making it seamless to set up a device.”

“They probably, it's a hundred billion dollar annual revenue opportunity, and Apple could have probably gotten 20% of that, or 10, 10% of that at least, so it wouldn't have been as big as AirPods.”

“Sonos had never considered building its own voice assistant, and the smart speaker era took them by surprise. McFarlane later admitted that they were late to recognize the impact of voice in mid-twenty 16.”

“In May, their revenue, they had a 24% drop in revenue.”

“I think they're not going to get bought by Apple because Apple could be like, well, why don't we spend a billion dollars developing a better speaker and sell it through our thousands of stores?”

“I think if they just make smarter, smart speakers, continue to focus on design, actually get their software right. There's definitely a billion dollar revenue business here.”

“In order to do the absolute, like, top-tier software engineering where stuff just works, like, you actually have to be a trillion-dollar company, like Apple. A ten-billion-dollar company just can't do it. Especially if it's an older company.”

“If you didn't deliver an experience wirelessly, you just weren't, you shrunk the market tremendously”

“For example, you look now at the cloud services. They were out the same time we really got started, and it was a wonderful thing, but people could not get their heads around getting their music out of the cloud. It was, it took a lot of incremental change, lik…”

“It took time until the services like Rhapsody or Pandora, you know, could really express all that was available. And that was really when it opened up for Sonos, but initially it was your ripped music collection.”

“And that, that was a big effort which had we not been successful, we probably would have stopped doing it in the early days.”

“He walked right up to me and pounded on my chest and said they were gonna sue us out of existence for having a scroll ring on our remote.”

“In retrospect, it wouldn't have made any difference, and we would have killed the company had we released The quality of product it was at that time.”

“Well, that's where it got a little complicated because iTunes had that digital rights management. So if you bought an iTunes track, you couldn't play that. But if you used iTunes to play your ripped music, you could.”

“So the traditional audio market that you're mentioning, we didn't really view them at all in the same way. Mindset is us. While they did fill the home with music, they just, you know, it was usually the B or C team TVs were much more popular, home theater rece…”

“What we were worried about is that Apple, Amazon, and Google would ultimately get into this space, and they understood software clearly they had a global footprint, They could do an amazing job, so we knew down the road we would compete, be competing with them…”

“I didn't want to be in a position where I was second guessing what Patrick was doing. I mean, when I left, I didn't stay on the board because who wants to have the founder of the board sitting on the board of the company that you're running.”

“You're not really competing against the whole company. You're competing against the section that's making a competitive product.”

“TiVo was a great company, but never decided, was it a product? Was it a service? Which is it? Is it both? And as the idea becomes mainstream, you've really got to do that and dive deeply. And the companies that survive do that well, and the companies that don'…”

“That's all true. It just fit. These were the first units that were fully assembled. We had a room that had the Quality Assurance team in it, and they were really trying to beat it up, and I thought that was the appropriate song, because they had a lot of work …”

“Prior to their IPO, they raised over four hundred and fifty million from the likes of Mike Volpe at Index, Satish at Redpoint, and eVentures to name a few.”

“So at that point there were a couple of hundred people at Sonos doing a couple of hundred million in revenue.”

“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 t…”

“It's even harder in hardware because you really don't want that many hardware programs that are not going to work. Right. Because it's a two year journey. You've got to get a lot of the details sorted out upfront and a lot of debate has to happen at that point…”

“Right when I came into Sotos, in fact, we made a decision, which I think speaks a lot to our culture, which was to push a product, which we really needed from a company perspective, needed out in kind of the holiday quarter. We pushed it out. I think two quart…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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”

“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.”

“On the direct side, their portfolio includes the likes of Sonos, App Annie, DocuSign, and Alibaba, just to name a few.”

“And now recently we just signed Heineken and we have Sonos and Shimano as a customer, TaylorMade Golf, and those ACVs are 20 plus, 20 K plus.”