GoKawiilToday, I’m talking with Tom Conrad, the CEO of Sonos. Tom and I have known each other for a long time — he was the chief technology officer of Pandora, VP of product at Snap, and the chief product officer of Quibi. He was also on the board at Sonos during its disastrous 2024 app redesign that threatened to crash the entire brand.
Tom took over as interim CEO to right 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 period now, and on to its next chapter with a huge product and platform launch called Sonos 27.
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I mean, come on, you all listen to the show. That is all the most Decoder bait imaginable. I have 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.
Those fixes involved a lot of big changes: to the company’s structure, its product lineup, and how it thinks about itself and what its product fundamentally 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 a 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 available on Sonos devices.
Oh, and of course we got into the weeds about smart home standards, because I am a smart home nerd and simply cannot help myself. But to his credit, Tom was willing to nerd out with me, and I think this conversation is pretty fun because of it.
Okay: Sonos CEO Tom Conrad. Here we go.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Tom Conrad, you’re the CEO of Sonos. Welcome to Decoder.
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