Some changes at Sonos. Patrick Spence, the company’s chief executive officer (pictured above), is leaving the company after eight years in the job. Tom Conrad, the co-founder of Pandora and a Sonos board member, is stepping in as interim CEO starting today.
2024 has been a complicated year for the speaker manufacturer. The company released a major update to its software platform that was crippled with bugs and removed some long-standing features.
While this could be problematic for any brand, it’s a major issue for a brand like Sonos. It’s a brand that is known for the reliability of its products. The main promise of Sonos speakers is that you can buy several speakers, and they will seamlessly work together across rooms and music services.
As a result, the company spent a ton of time fixing its software platform and releasing app updates to re-add features and make everything work more reliably. Products got delayed and sales have been down.
More recently, the company started shipping new products again with the release of the Sonos Ace headphones and Arc Ultra soundbar. But it seems like the company’s reputation has been tarnished, and it’s going to be difficult to recover — sales of the Ace headphones have been disappointing.
In August, the company laid off 100 employees, or about 6% of the company’s workforce at the time. Revenue fell 16% in the fourth quarter of 2024 compared to the same quarter in 2023.
Tom Conrad, the company’s interim CEO, has had a long career in tech. After founding Pandora, he joined Snap as VP of Product. He was also the Chief Product Office for the short-lived video streaming service Quibi. More recently, he created Zero, a fasting app.
“I think we’ll all agree that this year we’ve let far too many people down. As we’ve seen, getting some important things right (Arc Ultra and Ace are remarkable products!) is just not enough when our customers’ alarms don’t go off, their kids can’t hear their playlist during breakfast, their surrounds don’t fire, or they can’t pause the music in time to answer the buzzing doorbell,” Conrad wrote in an email to Sonos employees obtained by The Verge.
As Conrad’s new title suggests, Sonos’ board is searching for the company’s next permanent CEO. Sonos shares are currently up 3.3% in pre-market trading.
