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

“Well, the decade of marketing challenge for Sonos was if you tried it, you loved it, but trying to explain it to somebody, as you're accurately pointing out, was really hard to do. Once they started seeing it, they were like, wow, I mean, I remember we had a great partnership with a Wi-Fi chip company Athrose. And I remember showing it to their management team. And they were blown away. I mean, I remember the CEO saying, wow, I think I'm watching. History made here, and he was a huge music lover, so he was right in the heart of the audience. It was always the case if you tried it and or saw it, you loved it, but trying to explain it to somebody until they'd done that was a challenge.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It would come from the initial music source and the people we sold to had ripped their music collections. So they had taken them and put them on their computer. And they might listen to them on their computer, but they had them available. And then we would find them and play them. It took time until the services like Rhapsody or Pandora. Could really express all that was available. And that was really when it opened up for Sonos. But initially it was you ripped music collection.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, for sure. I mean, I was told by no end of people in the industry or outside of it that that was crazy and it would never work. But we were pretty persistent. And keep in mind, I had been through this with the internet before. So I had some level of confidence that once you dived into something and you saw the trends going your way, you saw something someone else didn't. And so we felt pretty confident it would go that way. In fact, we thought it would move faster than it did. It usually took longer. For example, you look now at The cloud services were out the same time we really got started, and it was a wonderful thing, but people could not get their heads around getting their music out of the cloud. It was. It took a lot of incremental change, like the iPod and the iPhone to get people to start having that expectation.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Wi Fi was just starting and that was the only, if you didn't deliver an experience wirelessly, you just weren't, you shrunk the market tremendously. And I think all of us, the common theme was we all loved music. We all wanted it in different places in the house, not just one room. You wanted to wake up to it. You wanted to listen to it when you were in your kitchen. You wanted to have it in your living room, ideally out in your patio. And we bought some of the systems that you could build into the house and they weren't reliable. They were hard to use. They were expensive. They often failed quickly.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Keep in mind it was the day of a hundred disc CD changer or a tape deck. So we started diving into more about how you would enjoy music through your house if the, you know, you could completely take a clean sheet of paper and design it. So you kind of went through, you started from what's the ideal experience you want to deliver and then you work through what that meant.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The basics were hey, the internet is going to come into your home. What's it going to change? So we ranked a bunch of stuff from alarm systems to smart home to music to video. Entertainment always popped way up there, and music, Napster had come out in 1999 and immediately been sued out of existence. The idea that you could have your music in the cloud or have access to all the music ever made was a no-brainer. In many ways, it was similar to what we had thought about at software.com because the original idea, selling software over the internet, why couldn't music be sold that way or distributed that way?”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I was nowhere near done. I mean, software.com was just an incredible opportunity because I got to visit almost every country in the world. And the internet was kind of just getting going. So it had really penetrated most businesses at that point. But as far as affecting you and your home, even internet broadband had only just started. So unless you lived in the Bay Area or certain places, you probably only experienced the internet through a dial-up modem, if you remember those. Was kind of the genesis behind Sonos. The four that officially started Sonos, we'd all work together at software.com.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, my first son was born in 2000, and my second son was born in 2002. And that was part of the factor, I remember we were remodeling a guest house on our property. And my son thought the contractor was his father, not me. It was a good warning about being a part of their life, which I heeded.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, more money than I'd ever imagined. You know, making money was never the goal. But that said, I had been luckier than I should have been. So for sure. That's true.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's correct. Believe it or not, we are about the only thing out there. As the internet kind of shifted to telecom and cable companies, that's where we really focused on. And if you were a telecom company anywhere on the planet or a cable company launching an internet service, you were probably using our stuff or we were knocking on your door to use it.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So one of the things we realized was one of the first thing a company wants to do is add email. So we had put a lot of time into a good email system at software.com and we thought, hey, we can commercialize this and really own that market and made a commercial email service that was really easy to use. That actually went well because we could sell it over the internet. Of course, we believed in selling software over the internet. And we had companies all over the planet buying it.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, you had to do a lot of evangelizing on what the internet was because people didn't really know what it was at that moment.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, funny enough, if you wanted to get on the internet in 92 and 93, you had to build a lot of the software yourself. So yes, we did have the skills to build it, or we learned them. But, well, it made a lot of sense. The folks that kind of were the gatekeepers at the big software companies at that time, Microsoft, Borland, Lotus, weren't interested in selling their software over the internet. They were more worried about hurting their sales through the conventional channels. And that turned out to be a bigger problem”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, that's a funny story. There was a big debate over whether the internet was Available for commercial use or for only academic use. And you could tell it was going to go to commercial use. It was just too valuable. So there was one organization that did the domain name registrations, and I sent a note in and I just happened to know there was a man and a woman. Who you did.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and so the idea was have a little piece of software that would fit on one floppy disk, put it in, connect the computer to the internet, and then purchase what you wanted off the internet, put your credit card in, and you'd walk away and it would install all of it.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the idea was to sell software over the net. So if you go back to that time, this was 1992. If you bought some software, it came on a stack of 20 floppy disks. And maybe they were the small ones in the little plastic, the three and a half inch. A little later, it would be a CD ROM, but it was a multi hour endeavor to get an”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you remember, that's right when the breakup of the Soviet Union was happening, and Russia had some really specialized scientific centers, these secret cities, and to exchange information with them, there was no real easy way to mail them anything or anything like that. You use this thing called the internet. Now, it didn't always work reliably, so you had to kind of understand how it worked. And I became the expert in the lab on doing that. So I was the go-to person for getting anything data related in and out of Russia at the time. And that just kind of hooked me. So I dove more and more in. And that was the genesis of the first company I started because another grad student and I were sitting around talking about how big this thing the internet would be. And we thought we should go off and start a company.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 it up, you don't bring them all the way with you. And I found myself after 25 years of startup companies, I was looking more for the downsides than I was the upsides. 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.”
2024-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sonos: John MacFarlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT