How Sonos rebooted itself

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**Nilay Patel** (1:56)
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 Tom Conrad, the CEO of Sonos. Tom and I have known each other for a long time. He was the CTO of Pandora, the VP of Product at Snap, the Chief Product Officer at Quibi, and he was on the board at Sonos during the disastrous 2024 app redesign that threatened to crash the entire brand. Tom took over as interim CEO to write the ship during that period, and then took the permanent role just about a year ago. As you'll hear him say, he thinks Sonos is fully out of that mess now, and onto its next chapter with a huge product and platform launch called Sonos 27 I mean, come on, you all listen to the show. That is the most Decoder bait Decoder stuff imaginable. I've been dying to have Tom on the show to talk about how the board decided to move on from previous CEO Patrick Spence, how he diagnosed the issues inside the company, and what decisions he made to fix them. It's no surprise those fixes involved a lot of big changes to the company structure, to its product lineup, and how Sonos fundamentally thinks about itself and what its product really is.
That's that new platform, Sonos 27, which you'll hear Tom call a new foundation for the company that makes every Sonos product work better as part of the system. There's a lot here, including how AI assistants can work across the system, the idea of having a mesh network of little computers in your home disguised as speakers, and of course, the testy relationship between Sonos and Google, which means Google's Gemini Assistant isn't currently available on Sonos devices. Oh, and of course, Tom and I talked about Weezy Smart Home standards, because I am a Smart Home nerd and I simply cannot help myself.
But to his credit, Tom was willing to get into it and nerd out with me. And I think this conversation is pretty fun because of it. Okay, Sonos CEO, Tom Conrad.

**Tom Conrad** (3:39)
Here we go.

**Nilay Patel** (3:40)
Tom Conrad, you're the CEO of Sonos. Welcome to Decoder.

**Tom Conrad** (3:42)
Thank you. As they say, it's so great to be here.

**Nilay Patel** (3:46)
I am just going to say, finally, I have been asking you to be on the show for at least a year, if not before. You and I have, I think the first time I met you was in the back of a car at CES when you were at Pandora. Sounds right. A hundred years ago. A hundred years ago.
We were children. We were little babies. That car was driven by a human driver. That's how far along we go. That's right.
Then you took a turn through Quibi, you and I talked through that, and now you're at Sonos. As you know, I'm a huge fan of Sonos. We had your predecessor, Patrick Spence, on the show a bunch of times. Many things have happened. I just want to start at the very beginning of this. You're about a year into being the permanency of Sonos. You have a bunch of news to announce. Just tell us what you think Sonos is today. What is your conception of this company?