Bose CEO Lila Snyder on the fight for high-quality audio

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Support for the show comes from Atio, the AI CRM.
What if all that annoying prep work was just finished the moment you walked into the office? Whether it's cloud, Slack, or with any other agent you build, you can access your customer data wherever you work through Atio's MCP and API.
Everything you'd normally miss gets flagged. And overnight, Atio reads your whole pipeline and tells you what needs your attention in the morning. Tomorrow is just a click away. You can go to atio.com/decoder, and you'll get 15 percent off your first year. That's atio.com/decoder.
Support for the show comes from ServiceNow. AI is moving fast across the enterprise, but without visibility, it's just chaos. Different tools, different models, different teams using AI in completely different ways. ServiceNow turns that chaos into control. With the AI control tower, you see all your AI across the business in one place. What it's doing, what it's done, and what it's about to do, so you stay in control. To put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:17)
We secure the world's AI future by securing the world's AI leaders. AI is being adopted faster than companies can secure it. Sensitive data is moving across AI models, and attackers are using AI to strike with unprecedented speed and precision. That's why CrowdStrike built the agentic cybersecurity platform for the AI era, to secure AI and to stop breaches, so you can embrace AI with confidence, not compromise. CrowdStrike, we secure AI, we stop breaches.

**Nilay Patel** (1:49)
Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking with Lila Snyder, who is the CEO of Bose. You almost certainly know Bose. It's one of the most famous brands in all of consumer tech. The company started 60 years ago selling speakers to consumers, and the company's focus on research and development has led it to be a leader in both car audio and of course, noise canceling headphones. Lila was last on the show about four years ago, and since then, she's dramatically re-architected the company. The focus on research is still there, but she sold off Bose Professional, acquired the high-end luxury audio brands, McIntosh Labs and Sonus Faber, and perhaps most importantly, started licensing all of that core Bose technology to other companies. That means that while you can still go buy a Bose soundbar or Bose headphones, the company is also turning into a B2B business, and you can now get Bose technology in Skullcandy headphones and Epson projectors, among the many other products. This is pure Decoder made. A big change in the business comes with a big change in structure. Becoming a software company in addition to a product company, comes with a whole new set of challenges, and Lila and I talked quite a bit about how it's all working out. I also wanted to know if this is all a reaction to the potential rise of AI wearables, products that might end up looking a lot like headphones, and which need all kinds of audio processing to enable voice in them. Is Bose just trying to sell tech to a range of new companies that might disrupt headphones entirely? Or does Lila have a plan for a headphones market, which was already once disrupted by phone vendors like Apple and Samsung, making their own products like AirPods and Galaxy Buds work better with her friends than the competition? We got pretty deep on this, and Lila was open about the challenges and the opportunities here. As Decoder listeners know, I'm a giant audio nerd, so I loved every minute of this conversation. I hope you do too. Okay, Bose CEO Lila Snyder. Here we go.
Lila Snyder, you're the CEO of Bose, welcome back to Decoder.

**Lila Snyder** (3:52)
Thank you so much.

**Nilay Patel** (3:53)
I'm really excited to talk to you. It's been four years since you were last on the show, which seems entirely too long.

**Lila Snyder** (3:59)
It's crazy.

**Nilay Patel** (4:00)
A lot of things have happened. Bose has bought some companies, you've sold some divisions.
The idea of what headphones are is largely the same in one important way, but maybe going to be very different in another important way. How are you thinking about Bose today?

**Lila Snyder** (4:16)
We are having a lot of fun in what I would describe as our second chapter of the transformation of Bose since I joined. And so, as you said, in some ways, many things are the same. We're still making amazing products for our customers. We're still excited about bringing that new technology forward in both our consumer business and our automotive business. But I would say two things fundamentally have changed as we've thought about growth for Bose for the future. For 60 years, it was all Bose. And we're now a multi-brand company. So as you said, we've made a couple of acquisitions. One of those was of the McIntosh brand. So a legendary 75-year-old audiophile brand that we absolutely love. And also Sonus Faber, which is an Italian craftsmanship heritage brand has also been around for over 40 years. And so that brought us two things, from one brand to multi-brands, but also into the luxury audio space. Second change for us is we've always been an amazing products company where we develop technology through research and a lot of development cycles. And all of that technology went into Bose products. And today, what's different is we're still doing that. And we've added a technology business we call Audio Tech, where we're taking that technology and starting to put it into other places. And the big insight for us was sound is really important. It's getting more important, we think, given everything that's going on in the world around us. And there are so many products, devices, that are out there that are using sound, whether that's audio or voice or even noise canceling, where those things are incredibly relevant. But they're not products that Bose would make. They're not targeted at our customer set. But we really have a strong belief in bringing great audio to as many places as we can.