How complacency can be a company's downfall
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This is Most Innovative Companies from Fast Company, where we speak to visionary founders to understand how they think, how they innovate, and what lessons they have to help you and businesses of every shape and size. I'm James Vincent, a founding partner at Foundr. This is a story about Macintosh and having audacious goals. The story's set around 2004, 2005, so Apple had already launched iPod and iTunes to great success.

But really, their Mac business was kind of stuck, to be honest, at around 3% market share.

And the category itself was, to be honest, mostly a commodity business, right? Most people were buying Dells with Microsoft on it. And so the software was written over here and the hardware was built over there and they were jammed together and there were blue screens of death and it was kind of a big mess and not very cool, right? So most people thought computers really weren't that great. And so they were like, well, I use one at work, but they're kind of stupid because they kind of don't work that great. And they're certainly not elegant. They're kind of ugly.

So one day, Steve walks into a meeting with us at Marcom and says, I really have a major issue with Mac. We have 3% market share and I don't do 3% market share. I want 90% market share. Now, if you...

Spent some time with Steve saying things like that sometime, you know, wasn't a huge surprise, but the important thing was to try to dig in, to understand what he was talking about because it was audacious, but it was also incredibly pointed. What he was talking to was a re orchestration of the category to move it out of being a commodity and turn it into a premium product.

And so that began the pursuit of a campaign. We created Mac versus PC. If maybe some of you remember, it was one of the funniest campaigns. Hey, I'm a Mac. Hey, I'm a PC. Hello. I'm a Mac. And I'm a PC. It's in tight. You okay? No, I'm not okay. I have that virus that's going around. Oh, yeah. You better stay back. This one's a doozy. 200 and something commercials ran over four years based on the premise that there were just lots and lots of reasons why it was...

not just different, but better, significantly better. And we just saw the market share go up and up and up and up and up and up and up. And today that campaign, of course, was, I think, changed some of the dimension of how Macintosh is considered. And you go on an airplane now and you look around, you see a fair amount of either computers that are Macintoshes or ones that look like MacBooks because they're just copied. But I think the most important thing to understand there was the audacious goal

was 3% of the current market to 90% of the future market. And the future market, 90% he wanted was computers over $1,000. He wasn't interested in the way the current category was structured, where it was only 3%. He was interested in changing the category so they owned 90% of the top tier of it,

which is of course what they do today. My guest today is Patrick Spence from Sonos, who, although he seems like a very nice Canadian, nice guy, and actually is, also sets audacious goals for his company, innovates incredibly, does it in his own unique and very special way. And I'm looking forward to sharing that with you. And here's my conversation with Patrick Spence from Sonos.

So Patrick's the CEO of Sonos, probably one of the best known brands in audio, certainly home audio, established in 2002, worth billions of dollars, 1,500 employees, a fairly sizable and successful business, Patrick, that you're running. I'm going to imagine that the last couple of years of COVID, people were spending a lot of time at home, right? And you guys, I think,

have done relatively well with that because people have invested in their homes. Is that fair to say? Absolutely. You know, I think it was a shock. Obviously, everybody's shifting to home. But for us, you know, we really threw out the playbook we had at that point and said, hey, how do we bring joy to all these people that are stuck at home? It really helped us get even more focused on our mission and try to make sure that we could tell people how Sonos can really improve their life at home.

Patrick, for those people that don't know, and I do know, I'd love to give you the opportunity to just describe how you got to Sonos, what you did before. Tell us a little bit about Patrick so people can get context for you. Yeah, you bet. So I grew up in a small town in Canada. There were really like kind of two formative things for me. One was that in second grade, I was introduced to this thing called a Commodore PET computer.

And I absolutely loved it and really developed a passion for technology and just what was possible with technology, the intersection of hardware and software. And I played a lot of team sports and ended up taking leadership roles in team sports, played pretty much every team sport out there. And I think those two things together really formed who I am today.

I spent the first 14 years of my life working at a little company called RIM when it was started. This is before we invented BlackBerry. So I joined when there were 150 people, no revenue, no BlackBerry. And we took that to become an $80 billion company, 17,000 people across every country of the world, 80 million daily active users of BlackBerry Messenger. So into something we could have never imagined, but a huge global company with a great brand. And then I wanted to...

kind of do it all over again and had the opportunity to join Sonos when it was about 200 people, 200 million in revenue. And we've taken that to today, 1700 people and almost $2 billion in revenue. So my story is really one of that intersection of technology, consumers, and also trying to build cultures and brands that matter and create a great place for people to work. I can't resist the urge to talk about BlackBerry, of course, just because...

You know, everybody knows I spent some time with Apple and launched the product that challenged the BlackBerry or the CrackBerry as was even described earlier.

But of course, BlackBerry is no longer. And so I'd love you to just sort of talk about, first, you helped build the company from before they had BlackBerry and you grew and built a massive business with a great following and a very, very devoted fan base, right? Very loyal customers. Yes. And yet something came along and absolutely changed everything and innovation, right?

let's say, a disruption, an innovation. Absolutely changed everything. And so just looking back at that moment, I'd love you to share the lessons as you see them for what BlackBerry did or didn't do or could have or couldn't do, because I know you were right in the middle of it and no doubt probably a squeaky wheel in that conversation. So please tell me the story. Yes, I was.

In the same way, the touchscreen and Apple and how revolutionary that was, buttons on a product were revolutionary at one point too, where everybody said, there's no way, like this doesn't make sense, right? And nobody will use this and what's going on. And so we brought that into a world

of paging and completely disrupted it. Then when we brought that and kind of incorporated the phone technology into it, you know, at that point, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola were giants. And they said this little company from Canada could never, you know, make a dent in this. And, you know, we became the leader in the smartphone space by really bringing the different parts together. And to your point of the

iPhone as well, like leaping ahead and looking at the intersection of computing, software, the wireless networks, like all of it together. And I think we, you know, we started to rest on our laurels to some degree as we push forward on that. You know, we had an app store, but we weren't really pushing it as hard as we could have. And you saw, obviously, Apple really make a big push on that front and apps and open some of those things up.

But I would say we also got distracted when Apple launched the iPhone. Verizon came to us and waived a huge check to create basically a response to the iPhone at that point because AT&T had the exclusive on the iPhone. We deviated from what made us great, and we actually reacted to the iPhone and built a

you know, a competitive product called Storm. And when we launched that product, our first touchscreen product, it was a Black Friday of one year. Over that weekend, we sold a couple million units, but it was a terrible experience. We rushed the product out because of the push from Verizon, the response, the pressure of the iPhone. And it basically threw our reputation down the drain over the course of a weekend.

And so I think there's an important lesson there and we could talk about how it relates to Sonos, but I think you have to be mindful and you have to be aware of what's happening in the competitive dynamic, but you also have to be careful not to just respond, right? You have to know who you are, what customers you're serving, where your strengths are and playing against that. And I think we lost sight of that, James, quite frankly. And then we had a chance after that to really pivot our business. And so we had 80 million daily active users for BlackBerry Messenger and there was a

part of the company where we really wanted to take that. We had it working on iOS, we had it working on Android, on desktop PCs. We had a lot of support from the wireless carriers to actually make it a standard in the industry because they saw iMessage as a threat, they saw Android as well as a threat to some of their messaging business.

And we really ran into a classic innovator's dilemma situation where half of the company wanted to keep BlackBerry Messenger proprietary to the hardware to sell more hardware because that's what we knew and what we did. And the other half recognized that, no, this is an opportunity to pivot and become really the standard and the leader in instant messaging and communication. At this point, WhatsApp had...

I think 5 million daily active users, we had 80 million. We had all the momentum we could have built on that, but we just couldn't get there as an organization because people were scared, quite frankly, of giving up that hardware revenue and putting the faith in the fact we could go and work on BlackBerry Messenger across platform and that would be a business. With regard to the fast company community, there's a lot of people working in all sizes and all manner of companies.

and just probably asking themselves, how do I solve the innovator's dilemma? How do I be a faster company? So, you know, I wonder how you think about that and the lessons from BlackBerry. I feel like you've innovated even when you didn't need to.

which is really an interesting way to think about it. And because I know you dominate the home, I've seen nothing but new products and collaborations and all kinds of innovations going beyond the home when you have such a solid domination of the home and clearly a very, very successful business. So let's maybe just talk about that as a topic, like innovating when you don't need to. How should

People think about that. I mean, I have the experience of having lived through and put my blood, sweat and tears into 14 years of building a company and seeing what happens when you're not continuing to push yourself outside your comfort zone. And I think that goes for us as individuals and as a company. And so one of the hardest things I think for a lot of the people that are probably listening or watching is that

that you need to focus to get your company to a certain point, right? It has to hit a point where you're testing product market fit, you're getting to a point where this works and like, do you have lightning in a bottle? And then what happens is if you're not careful, you can kind of get complacent with that.

And think, okay, we've got the thing, we've got it continuing to go, we're going to be fine. And we've seen this with some companies coming out of the pandemic, right, where they thought they had everything said and they thought they were going to be fine. And now they've realized, oh, no, we didn't because they didn't use the pandemic as a way to push even harder and push even further right into their organization.

But this really does drive me in terms of what else can we be doing? Where else can we bring what it is that we've built to people? What other things can we be building? And so I'll give you a couple examples. You know, certainly one that made our organization uncomfortable in the same way that BlackBerry Messenger going cross-platform would have made RIM uncomfortable was our IKEA collaboration. And really getting out of our comfort zone, you know, we'd never partnered with anybody to co-build a product and co-design a product.

And there was a lot of uncomfort in the organization. But I saw it very much as one of those moments where, hey, here's something to allow us to try new form factors, new price points, get us into new countries. And we did a lot of work with IKEA to see, is there a crossover in the kind of customers and where they are in their life as they think about what they want from Sonos? And so we had a good overlapping.

there. And then it meant like working differently and working together. And it challenged a lot of people internally, but that helped us grow and think about different ways and think about new partnerships. And so that allowed us as well to think about things like auto, right?

And so we've done a collaboration with Audi and we've put Sonos in the automobile for the first time. And that's been uncomfortable for people. But we want to be the world's leading sound experience company. And that means stretching outside the home. That means bringing out the portable products that we've brought out.

as well and learning how to do battery technology and Bluetooth and things outside of the home. All of these things, I can assure everybody, makes people internally uncomfortable, stretches them out of their comfort zone. And it's exactly the thing, James, that has to keep happening in order for us to get better as people and for Sonos to get better as an organization. I'm going to tell a story. When you and I first met, we chatted and we got introduced through a board member,

I remember at the end of that call, I was like, kind of jokingly, I'm like, Patrick, you need to get out more. And you laughed. And of course, what we meant was Sonos needs to get out of the home and not just be in the home. It's the comfort of dominating a category that then becomes part of the fabric of a culture that then kind of shuns innovation because it's really kind of comfortable.

So internally, maybe you can just tell me a little bit more about how you manage innovation. Like how do you keep that going? How do you do that?

So there's some things organically that you can do, and then there's some things inorganically. And organically, we have some teams that are exploring. And I would say there are some people that are more explorers versus those that are builders in the sense and kind of incrementally making products better and better. And you need to have both in the organization, and you need to protect the exploration efforts to make sure they get enough

oxygen to get to a point where you know and you can prototype something, test it and say, okay, this has legs or not. If I wasn't careful, if our team wasn't really mindful of protecting the people, the budget, the space to allow people to actually go and do that. And then the other thing that we've brought into the organization successfully, and we just brought this to the world with Sonos Voice Control, is we've been

actually acquiring companies as well that we think have great technology and are very innovative. And we bring them into the organization and they provide a real dose of innovation, inspiration, like all of those things that get us to something new. I would say they help inspire those already in the organization, but they bring a new perspective.

I love your definition of explorers versus builders. And it's not that the builders aren't exploring the development of the existing product, but the sort of definition of creating an Apple, it was Johnny Ives design studio, right? And only like three and a half people were allowed in there. And the product

The protection that Johnny had within the Apple culture was significant and it was steep. There's sort of a momentum that gets built in a company with senior people, with big jobs, operational efficiency, and the continuation of the existing business model that becomes the energy of the company unless the CEO says, great.

But this 10, 20% over here is just as important. And I know it's not delivering today, but it's our future. Exactly. And so we need those people, ring fence them, take care of them, nurture them, bring in almost

almost a different type of person. Like, do you think about those people a little differently? Do you, like, how do you insulate? So I'll say like two things. One is I think it's the type of people. And so some of the folks that we've brought in from other startups that we've acquired, but also some of the people that

are from early days Sonos, right, that have stuck with us, we've actually had them take on new kind of startup projects, right, because they helped build this company and their strength is really being able to be scrappy and kind of find that new thing and build it to a certain degree. But the other thing I'd say, James, is we have very much in the Apple way, like, you know, created these teams, right, in these areas that we protect. But the big difference I would say, and I do espouse to other

leaders, I think the importance of we share those ideas and those concepts that we're working on with the whole organization, because I think it's inspiring to the rest of the team to see all the things that we're working on. And I think it triggers them to think even more about what's possible in their area. Right. And so we are different in that way. And I think it's the way of the future. And I've just found it to be a very, very powerful thing to get people inspired and excited for the future.

Or they might see an opportunity to collaborate with one of those other teams or together to build something completely new. I think that's powerful in this day and age to have those connections for everybody to be trying to connect the dots, if you will. So far, we found that to be a very powerful force. Another thing I recall from our interactions just as we work together,

It was actually just a very simple metric. And I think what Sonos used to do was count the number of homes they were in. And I remember one of the critical conversations that came out of our discussion was, we need to move from counting homes to counting people. I have noticed in the last year or so, really a movement in the brand. I feel it to be...

more out in the world, more cultural, more connected with people. And to be honest, I think I used to think of Sonos as like rooms with speakers hidden in the corner. Yes. And I'm starting to think of Sonos as people carrying it around and having an interaction and bringing the emotion that music of course brings to them. You want

You want to talk to that a little bit? Yeah. I mean, that has been a huge breakthrough for us and connecting with that emotional side. I think coming from, you know, more of an engineering idea and these beautiful products, right? We take such pride. I would argue nobody cares as much about building kind of the, an amazing product as our people do. And we build these things to be in your home for, you know, 10 plus years.

But using the metric we have around homes and rooms, and then as well, if you would have looked at the way that manifests in the way we think about things, and then the way we actually tell our story to the world, you would have seen a lot of imagery of beautifully curated rooms with our products kind of as the hero and no one in the room. Yeah.

And the thing everybody loves about Sonos is- It's playing to itself. Right? It creates, and then we're like, oh, that looks so great, right? We're so proud of that in a way. But you then aren't connected as well as you should be with, okay, how are people actually using it? And what is it that we're doing? And then you watch and you see, like, even as we look at,

you know, as we do studies with people on these kinds of things, like they're so happy, they're excited. There's like dance parties that start, like all of these things. And that's what we needed to tap into. And that's what you see now, like with our latest product, Ray launching, you'll see people there, right? And they're getting immersed in the actual experience of the video and the audio together. So a meshing of those senses and like bringing them into it and into the world that's there and really feeling that through audio. And I think it is getting us

better at getting in tune with like the way people's emotions react to certain audio, certain video, some of the things that are there. That's been a huge breakthrough in terms of how we think about people and servicing them as opposed to this idyllic, well-curated room that doesn't really exist, right? Like you would never find nothing was ever out of place, right? And we know that's not real life. We know real life is a lot more.

And we want to get into the messiness of real life. And we want to deliver the kind of experiences that really help make life that much better.

I think this is about you connecting with a whole new generation, right? It's you as a CEO saying, Sonos does not need to become my dad's brand, right? Which is like, oh, I was brought up with Sonos. They're always in the house, but now I'm going to use this new thing because it's much cooler. And this celebrity said it was cool. So I should go and use that. So there's huge benefit in that building great product. You're a great products company, right? And that's the foundation of you. It's the foundation of Apple. They're a great products company.

Built on top of that is a cultural understanding of what's going on in the world and what's coming next. Actually, Apple had reached the point in early 2000s where we did a survey and kids didn't really connect with the brand. They were like, "I don't know. There's an iMac, but whatever. They don't really have products for me. Maybe my dad's an artist and he likes them or a designer or something." The iPod was the beginning, obviously, and turned into prelude to the iPhone and the rest of it.

Definitely a next generation. I mean, because Apple was a 20-year company by then. And its second life, of course, was massively bigger than the first life. What does the future of Sonos look like? Where are you going? You know, we want to be everywhere where people experience sound. And we will go beyond that, you know, over the long term as well. There's no category that we shouldn't play in of audio, ultimately.

It very much is in the Apple kind of ideal as well of being that aspirational brand. You know, we don't, we're not talking about trying to create cheap products and try to address the needs. Like you still have to stand for something and we stand for, you know, great sound. We stand for simplicity, ease. We stand for connectedness.

I think Apple's led the way in showing that people want that, right? And they want that on a large scale. And so, you know, we're doing that for sound in a way that no one else does. And when people think about sound, we want them to think about Sonos. And that is really kind of our push as we think about the next decade.

what are the lessons to be learned so that the big companies don't lose the advantage they have and don't find themselves blackberry eyes? And what I'm hearing from you is just constantly, relentlessly build innovation on top of

the culture that you've established, which is very product focused. And so it's not about not being yourself, but it's about just constantly pushing a little bit further out of your comfort zone, bringing in new people so that you're always moving forward. James, the one thing I would say, you know, from that BlackBerry experience of having, you know, almost done a direct response to the iPhone, you know, with what we did with BlackBerry Storm is I think people need to also be thoughtful

about if you see something happening in your competitive dynamic or set, what is the right step for you as an organization? So at Sonos, we saw Amazon and Google jump in with these cheap low-end speakers, right, with voice. And so there was a faction of the organization that said, oh, we should go build those $25 speakers, you know, make a better $25 speaker and go, you know, compete head on. And I said, that's exactly what we're not going to do.

right, because that's very much like responding to the iPhone with a worse iPhone. And instead, what we said is, no, we've always stood for providing customers choice and choice of all the services. And so we co-opted the Amazon and Google voice assistants to bring those onto Sonos products in a way only Sonos could, giving people choice in the same way we give people

choice of any music streaming service. So let's give them the choice of any voice assistant as well. And that's a way to compete in a different way, play to your strengths, right? In terms of what we stand for and who we are without going like directly and responding. And I think too often companies and especially, you know, first time founders or CEOs will do a response as opposed to take the time to figure out, no, what's the right way, you know, for us to keep building on what we're building and is true to us.

How do we play in this a little bit differently? I think is a really important lesson for people. Yeah, I think time and time again, it's been proven that people will pay for good experiences

experiences, products, services, and to look at a category and say, oh, no, no, we have to go down in order to compete. Actually, sometimes you go up in order to compete. Sonos, for me, it's almost like an Uber of its generation in a way. It's kind of like, oh, before Sonos, it was freaking impossible to get sound in your house. You're just like, oh, I've got this thing, but have you got the connection with the thing and the thing with the, I don't know, have you got like, oh, fuck it, just play it out, you've

Totally. Right? And suddenly Sonos was just like, it just works. Yes. I remember getting the first Sonos, whatever that was, put it in, a couple of speakers, click. Oh my God, it works. Everyone's like, I want to play music. Oh, just jump on that. What? What is that? Click. It works. Right? And somehow Sony, I mean, all these other companies that seem to own consumer electronics in the home,

didn't see that or didn't get that. Like, what do you think that was? Well, and actually, I think it's a common thread through BlackBerry, Sonos, and as well, Apple with what they've done. And what it is, is really using software and some of the emerging technologies to disrupt an industry, right? And so even with BlackBerry,

I mean, the reality is all the stuff existed for a Nokia or Motorola to be able to create some of this. But what they didn't have was expertise on the software side to really build the hooks that you needed into the next generation of technologies. And that was same with at Sonos is that you could have put the pieces together to create a whole home audio system by bringing like a router together with certain software that you could buy separately with, you know, Sony speakers or Bose speakers or some of those things. But it was a nightmare. Yeah.

like to actually go do that. So what we did was bring all the pieces together to make it easy for customers. And if you can take, like there's rocket science level complexity behind the scenes in terms of what we build, but if you can take all of that and boil it down into something that makes it really easy for customers, you're just gonna win in that particular area. And that's what we did was take a whole bunch of different areas that we could pull together and create something brilliantly easy for the customers

And that's a winning strategy. And I would say that was like a key thing for BlackBerry as well, because you could create the ability to put email on a mobile phone, but it was a nightmare for customers until we made that really simple. And at Apple, I think they've done that in terms of, you know, you could have went for any mobile phone and got third-party apps, but Apple with the App Store made that possible.

simple in terms of being able to do that through what they did. And so those things that, you know, we look at and in hindsight, we take for granted are huge breakthroughs. And you want to look for those areas and those trends that maybe the current leaders don't necessarily think about. So the Sony, Panasonic, Bose, like leaders in the audio area, they didn't have any investment in software. They weren't thinking about streaming and the internet and all of these things.

We use that and ran at that in those industry trends in order to build something that we knew they couldn't and deliver customers an experience that would make music available in every room of your home if you wanted.

I want to flip to culture and you and comparing Sonos with a couple of other companies. And then I want to hear you sort of talk about Sonos. So I just give a couple of examples. I'm going to use Netflix because I think it's because I'm always using Apple. So I'm going to use Netflix this time. They put out this amazing thing about 10 or 12 years ago. It's a document about the types of people that should come work at Netflix. There's a lot of very, very interesting things about it, but it's definitely about the very best.

And they attracted some of the very best people in the last decade. And one of the things that stuck with me was we're not a family, we're a team.

And we might be a squad and there'll be a players and people on the bench and they, you know, but we want the a team players and we're not a family. It's not that we won't take care of each other, but we expect a high performance environment. The other reference point I wanted to throw out there was, you know, in the last two or three years of working with Steve, when he was close to passing away, he created the Apple university and the Apple university. He brought a wonderful professor in for who knew all about this kind of stuff and he

We worked together on building these little cards that were kind of like the leadership deck, which is a deck of like 36 cards. And they were kind of like what Apple is truly about.

as a culture. Like if you were asked this, what would you do that? He created Apple university and all the direct from, I think it's direct to level above go through this sort of Apple university, which is kind of like, how do we tackle stuff? You know, a thousand no's for every yes, like stop saying yes to things and start thinking about what you say no to, you know, like stuff like that. I just gave you the Netflix and, and Apple examples. How do you, as a leader create energy within that, you know, come

comfortable, well, Patrick's a nice Canadian guy. Back to that, you don't have to be mercurial to create energy in an organization. Correct. You don't have to be difficult. So how do you go about that as a leader within Sonos? So there's two things as a leader that I focus on. One is strategy, which we've talked about in terms of wanting to be the world's leading sound experience company and how moving sound fits into that in terms of what we're trying to do. But I also have an ambition for us on the culture side, which is we want to be an adaptable company

admired and enduring company where people can do great work and everyone feels welcome and included. So we have specific statements of terms of what we're trying to build strategy-wise and culture-wise inside the organization. And so those are where we're putting our energy. Strategy is easy at the end of the day because it's where you play and how you win. And we play in sound and we win through experience. And so we have a set of experience principles that we train the entire organization on of here is what a Sonos experience looks like.

And in terms of what we're trying to build and how we go through that. And then we have a set of behaviors we expect from everyone in terms of what they live up to. And I would say a lot of it, James, is from being on high performing sports teams, having grown up and understood that there's a variety of different personalities and it takes a variety of different

personalities and expertise in order to build something great. But you don't have to tolerate the asshole and some of these things that I think we in the past sometimes were okay with. It's not about selling somebody on the opportunity. It's about giving them the stories, getting a chance to meet with a lot of folks and understanding, is this going to work for

you know, for both of us, right? In terms of what's there. And do you want to join a company that is trying to build something special in this way? But I think we probably at this point have a benefit to some degree of, you know, you're selecting a bit for a company that's strong, but at the same time, one that is a challenger to some of the big tech companies that are out there, right? And so we are able to attract some

very, very talented people that want to really dive in and build and push on those kind of things that can't happen inside a much bigger organization. And if I were a startup founder, I would be using that as a way to try and attract people as well, which is like you get an opportunity here for an experience and probably a breadth of impact and engagement that you wouldn't anywhere else.

We use that to our advantage, but I think you can be collaborative. You can be respectful. You can go through and do these things and still be pushing each other. Right. And I think it's hard. I think I have to set the right example. My leadership team does as well, but we are different in the way I've met a lot of companies in that I measure the people on my team kind of half based on what they've achieved and half based on how they've achieved it. So how have they led, you know, with our behaviors, how are they showing up in the organization, all of these things. And I think.

think that's important to build something that lasts because to me, it isn't about how we're doing today. For me, it's about is Sonos growing relevant, a cultural force 10, 20, 30 years after I'm out of here.

At the end of the day, this is our opportunity to build something that has a positive effect on the world. Right. And so that some of the amazing people that leave Sonos and go start another company will take some of the things that they learned here and hopefully use that there and create a culture where people can do great work. They want to be there. Everyone feels welcome and included. And they're creating amazing products. And if we can have that impact, I think that's the best impact we can have on the world.

That's lovely. You're trying to create a culture that is attractive for people to live in, to cooperate in, to get the best out of each other, to work with each other, and that you don't need the assholes to get to innovation. You just need to push innovation.

gently but firmly, but you can create a safe environment within which to do that. You know, respect is one of the key things that's there. So respect, ownership, so people will take a sense of that ownership and we're all owners and we are through the way that we still continue to provide equity to everybody. Transparency as well. So again, going to that point of sharing what we're working on across the organization and collaboration. And so all of those things, I think, build a

a culture of trust and what we're trying to do. But being respectful also means if you don't agree with something or something's off the rails and people are pretending it's not, you speak up, right? And say, no, like this is important. I need to raise this and go through it. And so I think respect is the right thing for me. And we treat each other with that level of respect.

That I've seen kind of through tech sometimes isn't always there. And I do think it's actually something that, you know, sets us apart in a way. But I'll tell you, sometimes that does get misconstrued as niceness and it's not nice to escalate, right? Or something like that. And so I'm always, and my leadership team's always trying to teach people that no, respect means like you do speak up and with ownership, right? And some of these things and collaboration doesn't mean we all agree and we compromise and create a crappy product.

It still means, you know, like we work through and sometimes we're going to be in a situation where we do have to disagree and commit. So we have people that have certain responsibilities and make certain decisions that people won't agree with. And we still respect them in that. And we move on, right, in terms of what we do, because there is a huge amount of tension in all of that. It's always running into each other and making sure we can, you know, work through that in a respectful way just is a superpower, quite frankly.

I think the biggest takeaway for me from my conversation with Patrick at Sonos is to constantly be thinking about innovating even when you don't need to. Even when you dominate a category, what is it that's happening? What is it that's changing? Do you have people in your organization who are constantly thinking about growing and developing, not just where the next version of the existing product goes, but

Are there new categories? Is there new approaches? He used software as an example of something that in

entire massive companies are just basically not thought through. And that was the foundation of Sonos, cracking the fact that music is just a hit button and it works in your home. So I think, yeah, constant innovation, even when you don't need to, is the first lesson I would share. I think the second one, and I was ribbing Patrick about being the nice guy from Canada because we always sort of had that relationship, but I do think he very specifically, strategically

stated that you can be an innovative company. It doesn't need to be mercurial, doesn't need to be sharp elbows. It can be collaborative. And he, I think, really spoke up for, with great pride, the culture that he created that was both a great place to work and a very innovative place to work. And getting that balance right isn't always the easiest thing. And I think that it's a testament to Patrick's leadership and to the success of Sonos.

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Writing by Matias Sanchez. Our booker is Alex Webster and our production coordinator is Nikki Checkley. This podcast was done in collaboration with Stephen Butler, Rebecca Jeffries and Nick Barham, partners at Founder and the rest of the team at Founder.