YouSaid · the spoken record

John MacFarlane

lines on the record: 68
first: 2024-02-19
most recent: 2024-02-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“That's all true. It just fit. These were the first units that were fully assembled. We had a room that had the quality assurance team in it, and they were really trying to beat it up. And I thought that was the appropriate song because they had a lot of work ahead of them. So I played it full volume for them in that room.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh boy, timing and luck is so critically important because as you pointed out, there are lots of companies that have their timing wrong. So I would say timing is maybe it's 80% and hard work is 20. You got to put the hard work in because the luck comes your way. I mean, I'm sure it's the same for you guys. If you don't put the work in, the opportunities aren't going to come and you're not going to grow. But boy, if your timing isn't right, those two things are not going to get you across the finish line.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's funny, actually. A lot of people I run into that work there I don't know. So, you know, seeing sitting next to somebody talking about Sonos or seeing a Sonos jersey and not knowing the people, you know happens. I mean, it's like staying in your child's life. There is a period of time where you need to be prescriptive about things. cross the busy road And there's times when that kind of prescriptiveness is just going to hinder their development. Think for me and Sonos, it was just far better to keep my fingers out of it. And, of course, if the company fails after I leave, that's not great on me, right?”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“True. But you're not really competing against the whole company. You're competing against the section that's making a competitive product. Tivo was a great company, but never decided was it a product? Was it a service? Which is it? Is it both? And as the idea becomes mainstream, you've really got to do that and dive deeply. And the companies that survive do that well and the companies that don't. And I think Patrick has done a wonderful job of staying on that.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, first off, I only got it to about Josh Shy of a billion. Patrick really carried it through a billion and through two billion. So, you know, if I got the foundation set up correctly, then good. That's what I should have done. But they carried it past that.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I remember my wife and I Patty would take a walk and I would get phone calls during the walk, which would drive her crazy. And after I was out of there, I went with her for a walk. And she had signed up for a bunch of boards. And her phone was ringing off the hook. And my phone didn't ring that whole walk.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, it was wonderful. I mean, Guy, I love reading. I've always been a reader. For 25 years he would pick up the buck by the side of your bed and you'd start reading and five pages in you'd fall asleep and then you'd pick it up the next day and you'd have to reread three of the five pages and that just was no fun. I mean I distinctly remember after leaving Sonos in January and being able to read a book from start to finish. In the middle of the book, thinking, geez, I'm such a loser, I should be doing something more productive. So I definitely had to deal with those feelings of disconnect too, but it was fantastic to be able to read a book.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know, but I wanted to give the company its best shot at being successful, and if they needed my help, they'd call me. And I'd be happy to help. And if they didn't, they wouldn't.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know my ego was not based around that. I really, I wanted the company to be successful 10 times more than I wanted to be the leader of the company. I had kind of decided and I'd shared with board members maybe six months before we did the official transition in January. So Patrick was kind of running the company already. So when I stepped out and he stepped into the CEO role, I didn't I didn't want to be in a position where I was second guessing what Patrick was doing. I mean, when I left, I didn't stay on the board because who wants to have the founder of the board sitting on the board of the company that you're running?”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One thing you realize is you know very well when you're leading people, you bring them through your ups and downs. So you really have to be mindful of that so that when you're having a down or you're having an up, you don't bring them all the way with you. And as a leader, you want to be that, you want to choose optimism. And I found myself after 25 years of startup companies, I was looking more for the negative, the downsides than I was the upsides. And that's, I just didn't want to be that person. I'd run into people like that. I didn't want to be that person. And that's not the person you want leading you. You want the person that's seeing the nine out of 10 upsides, not the nine out of 10 downsides, if you will.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, more I'd say with my wife's breast cancer and my kids are teens. And I sprinted the marathon, if you'll put it that way. I mean, I was always really good at keeping a little bit of reserve and never trying to sprint a section. I sprinted and I just burned myself up. And so I just found myself not the person I wanted to be at work. I'd be angry or I'd have a shorter attention span. I wasn't enjoying it as much. And on top of that, I wanted to successfully lead the change to embracing voice assistance. Because as you can imagine, there was quite a bit of debate over whether we should go that way or not. And so you don't really want to leave that half that effort half finished. And I didn't really realize when I was burned out that I was burned out, it took a little time to have that perspective.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hard to say maybe because if you wanted a Sonos and you wanted a voice assistant, you could have that. Whereas before in 2015, you had to choose one or the other. And it was after I left, so I was uninvolved in it, and I don't know any of the inside, but I think they just felt it. You know, as I've told you, in my view, the voice assistants still, you know, their time is coming. I think they were just too early. Like now you see the startup companies trying to integrate voice assistance with the AI stuff. Do I believe in that? Yes. You know, is that 10 years away, or is it two? That's the question, right?”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, for sure. It always is when you start something new. But you just have to ask yourself, is this a better way to fill your home with music? And we felt it was. So we put the work in.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, a brand gives you certain permissions, but you have to then follow up and deliver on that. And I think Sono stayed true to its roots and continues to do a great music experience. And as it does that, I think that works. I think Apple of all those brands has the brand permission to do a great home music experience. But they've got so many other things to do they haven't really done that.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, at that time, I thought that was a probably bad idea because Amazon, Google, and Apple with Siri were clearly running that down hard. So the positioning we took was to be compatible with all of those, integrate with them just like the music services such that you'd use the voice assistant for selecting which music you wanted, but we would be the person filling your home with music.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A few months. And then I really pulled hard on the whole company to realign us around smart speakers and voice assistants.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I was actually probably too blase about it. I had paid attention to the voice recognition market forever, and it consistently under-delivered and underperformed. So I looked at it more as a gimmick than I did as a real thing. I would say they went, they made the cardinal mistake of trying to go after everything and under-delivered on everything. And since it's a first impression thing, you see it in their numbers. People try it, but they don't keep coming back and doing it or grow their use. So I think the promise of voice response for music in the home is still ahead of us, not really behind us.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the traditional audio market that you're mentioning, we didn't really view them at all in the same mindset as us while they did fill the home with music. They just, you know, it was usually the B or C team. TVs were much more popular, home theater receivers. So they were just kind of on autopilot. And what we were worried about is that Apple, Amazon, and Google would ultimately get into this space and they understood software clearly. They had a global footprint. They could do an amazing job. So we knew down the road we would be competing with them. We didn't know when. We didn't know how. So we were more playing scared through that period of, you know, when at least I can speak for myself, when does Apple enter? If they did a great product, they... A lot of hurt on us”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, you've got to keep in mind we, I mean, I remember at the CES show in 2005 when we released, a guy came over, I think it was from Yamaha and asked the people that were working the booth, you know, how many inputs do you have? And the person answered, well, an infinite number because we have an internet connection. And he said, well, how do you have an infinite number? You don't have enough connectors on the back.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The best experience by a long shot you would have is if you had Sonos with those streaming services. Otherwise, you had the complexity of having a ripped library. So I didn't think we ever viewed it as dominating the marketplace. We just saw so much to do.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, at that time, first off, we didn't feel like we were dominating because it's a global market. And every country, everywhere on the planet had its own complexities, including the music companies licensed at that time by country. was available in Sweden. It wasn't available anywhere else. And Rhapsody was available in the US, but it wasn't available outside of the US.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I would say no. There were competitors, but they were all traditional audio. So Phillips had a product that competed against us. Yamaha had a product. Sony had a product. There were a variety of, there were a couple of startups that competed, but none of them worked well. So I wouldn't say we were alone, but if you were a reviewer who was competently, you were going to rank us first.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was expensive. Yeah, and a play fog, which came out in 2009. Really opened up the growth. And you're right. It was easier because before that you had to buy a unit, you had to buy speakers. You had to connect the speakers to the unit. And the Play5 was all in one. So you bought it, you plugged it in, and it just worked. And so you're right, it was less expensive, it was easier to use, it just made more sense all the way around.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and they went to zero, near zero. It dropped like off a cliff. And so we replanned. We had a wonderful guy running the commercial side of the company at the time. And he just sat down and really worked his way through it. That was also the year that would have been 2008. So we released the iPhone controller, which helped because that made the purchase cost lower.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we went from like 100% year on year growth or to, I think, 2008, we grew 10% or. Maybe we grew, but not that much. So we definitely had to temper things and select what we were working on. And it was scary. I mean, it really started the end of. So, the information we had to see what was happening was the first players being set up. And when you set up a Sonos, it would radio in and say, hey, I got set up. Is there any new software for me? And then we'd prompt you, hey, you know, there's a later version of software do you want to download it?”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's where it got a little complicated because iTunes had that digital rights management. So if you bought an iTunes track, you couldn't play that. But if you used iTunes to play your ripped music, you could. So that was friction for sure. And we had back and forth with Apple about using the DRM. But then they took it off. So then it didn't matter.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. When we very first demonstrated Rhapsody, you needed a computer in the middle, but pretty quickly the Sonos could reach out to the Rhapsody services and do it all directly without a computer involved at all.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, it was that was the mind blower. I mean, I remember when we got that integration working and we did a kind of press tour and we had a little hot spot, wireless hotspot. And so you could, you know, I went into Walt Mossberg's office and said, what do you want to listen to? Anything ever made? And of course, when you say that to somebody, they're going to challenge you with some very esoteric something. And it would just blow people's minds. And I mean, we had reviewers who would, okay, what's the trick here? Where's the hard drive? There isn't one. It's in the cloud. So that was a big paradigm shift for sure.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, uniformly they were a music lovers and they wanted music around their home. So most of them had already digitized some amount of music for their iPod or whatever. And keep in mind this is 2005 now, so the iPod had been out for two years. 2006, I think, was when we first integrated Rhapsody. So that's when you could literally play anything ever made on their service.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, zero to, I think we probably did 10 to 20 million that year. I mean, we had unrealistic. I mean, a bunch of people coming from software in a hardware business, you can sell only as many as you make. And only if they're in the right stores and the right places where people want to buy them. And so the whole logistics learning of how to get the units in this, I mean, a given Best Buy store might do really well, but then run out. And then another store might have too many. And so learning how to manage Best Buy and all of that is a whole art in and of itself.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You could buy it directly from us. And by the end of the year, we were in Best Buys, we were in, let's see, what was the chain that was on the East Coast Tweeter, if you remember them.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, like at that Wall Street Journal conference, we took pre orders there and held a lot because you could put your hands on the unit you could see.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, exactly. And you had to have a great positive first experience if you're going to build the brand on word of mouth. So we didn't ship until 2005”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, mostly around the wireless. So we just hadn't achieved quite the bar we needed, and we had some of the problems with latency and range that we hadn't worked all the way through. So we had to skip that holiday season. And of course, you feel like you have to make that holiday season in retrospect. It wouldn't have made any difference. And we would have killed the company had we released the quality of product it was at at that time”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's a nice summary of what really happened was we were running really hard to release the product. So we announced it and I think that would have been June 2004 We were really trying to make the holiday season in end of 2004, but we just didn't have the quality felt we needed to have. So we had to postpone.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, very. Yeah, it was an interesting experience. And in fact, I push back on him because we had been a little worried about that. So we had done our homework on filing some patents and understanding where their work was. And I told him, well, you have no grounds to stand on. There's nothing you can sue us over. And later I learned he checked and had heard the same thing. The relationship I had with him after that was all positive and he wasn't aggressive with me at all ever after that. So it just turned out to be the right way to handle Steve in that moment.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's exactly right. We had done it in parallel, unknown that they were doing what they were doing, so really had no overlap with them at all.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“App And he walked by, and I had known him from a previous context. And he said, you stay right there. And he went and got Steve Jobs and walked him over. And of course, that was like bait for all the Wall Street Journal, but he walked right up to me and pounded on my chest and said they were going to sue us out of existence for having a scroll ring on our remote.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, he could. So we fortunately exceeded his expectations and he wrote a great review and everything went well from that. Yeah.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Walt Mosberg had written reviews on similar units. So the goal was to get him really hooked so he would write, if you recall, he had like the Wednesday column that was on the far right from his massively influential.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, at the time, what we sold were two units that you connected to speakers. So they didn't have the speakers built in.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No. What we did was there was a room that all the interviews were done and there was kind of a foyer that you went out and it's where you got food and drinks and stuff like that. And we put those around the foer so you could play with them. Our price point was too high at that point, but it deliver how much.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, that's where it's a true team effort. Like Trung Mai, one of the co-founders, really focused on getting the manufacturing and supply chain in place. And it turns out he's just incredible at building relationships. One of the other co-founders, Tom, worked on sales and marketing. Another co-founder, Craig, did about everything else. And fortunately, we had a broad enough team. Andy Schuler, who was one of the early people put together the software team. And I would say without each of these people, if we didn't have one of them, we wouldn't have been successful. I mean, Sonos was a wonderful thing because everybody believed in the mission. Fill your home with music. What a wonderful thing. Who doesn't want their home filled with music? And if you don't, you probably weren't going to work there.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're constantly worried about how much inventory you've built and how quickly you're getting paid and if you have enough cash on hand for the next Christmas season. So there's a lot to do there.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I was just the dumb enough person in the room to take the job. Hopefully I was inspirational enough and I held the bar high enough on certain areas that really mattered for the company. But you talk about being well capitalized. You're never well capitalized as a hardware company. Yeah.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we self funded through the first big manufacturing run. We had an angel and then we took our first Venture capital probably in 2005”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, because the customers didn't have an IT department. So you had to work. So yeah, it created a whole parallel network and. Worked around any imperfections you had in your network as well as it could.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, basically, as long as any one unit can see another unit, it all works and making the mesh network work and then making it reliable was the heart of the matter in that. And that was a big effort, which had we not been successful, we probably would have stopped doing it in the early days. Wi-Fi was really unreliable in the home. And you couldn't, you had to be reliable or you couldn't, you weren't going to grow.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we had to develop this technology called a mesh network, and that's why we needed that close partnership with Atheros to do that”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Way Wi Fi was originally specked, you had these units people generally think about them as their router in their house and you had to be a distance from that for it to work.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT