YouSaid · the spoken record

Lila Snyder

lines on the record: 94
first: 2022-11-29
most recent: 2022-11-29
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

“So, I think we start with who's our customer. For us, our customer is the music lover, right? These wireless headphones do a lot of jobs, right? They're communication devices, they're listening devices. They do a lot of different things. And different consumers care about different features depending on their primary use case. We are very focused on the music lover and the entertainment lover, right? So for us, we lean in really heavily to the features that matter to those specific customers and recognize that our competitors may have other advantages because they're leading into different consumer sets. But we really focus on that noise cancellation, which creates, I think of it as a clean palette, right? Amazing noise cancellation just creates this stage that you can build immersive lifelike audio on top of.”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So your headphone line right now, like all headphone companies, you had to survive the no more headphone jack shock of 2018 or whatever it was, right? I mean, the whole industry changed when Apple and then Samsung and then everyone else removed the headphone track. Your interconnect changed. Now you are wholly dependent on Bluetooth. The big companies now all have proprietary riffs on Bluetooth where they get to self-preference their own products. Apple has, I think they're up to H2 now. They got a chip. They've got a stack. They've got a whole UI that's built in the operating system. Samsung has the same thing for the Galaxy Buds. Google has the same thing with Pixel Buds. How do you compete in that kind of marketplace?”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Certainly are in the headphone space, but we're really in three big spaces directly, which is in the home, the home theater, and the home music experience that you have in the car, which is a very important and big part of our business as well, and then on the go, headphones.”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're much more balanced than that. And it's interesting. I think it depends on your entry point. And one of the most interesting things that's happened to me since I joined Bose is wherever I go in the world and I say that I work at Bose, the first thing that happens is I get a story about the first product I had, the product I love the most, and it's awesome. It's like the most fun part of my job is just hearing our customers talk about how excited the products are. I sort of came in with my own view. And what I've learned through all of those thousands, I think, now conversations is that your view of what Bose is depends on your entry point. So for a lot of customers, Bose is a car audio company, right? Because their daily experience with Bose is in their car where they have this amazing experience on their commute to work, maybe less often than they've commuted in the past, right? So the entry point into Bose matters a lot.”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talk about the stuff you do. I promise. We're going to talk about products. Let's start. You mentioned the three buckets. There's noise canceling, there's immersive audio, and there's hearing what you want. And then inside of that, there's headphones and cars and all these things. Let's start with headphones. That's what I think of Bozes right now, is the noise canceling headphone company. I owned a pair of quiet comfort twos. Our own Chris Welsh reviews headphones says that earbuds too are the best noise cancelling earbuds.”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it's that passion first, and so we attract a little bit of a different vibe, I think, when you think about employees that want to come to work at Boez.”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I won't go into detail on it, but we've created a comp structure that shadows that a bit. It's never going to have the extreme upside of picking the right tech company at the right moment where the options go crazy, but it provides plenty of upside opportunity for our employees as we're successful. So I think it works. The other thing I would say is you come to work for Bose because you're passionate about what we do. That doesn't say money isn't important and we certainly pay fairly, but our value proposition doesn't start with how much money you're going to make when you come to Bose. Our value proposition starts with you love music, you're passionate about consumer products, you love automotive and you love music and you want to put those two passions together, whatever it might be, right? We attract talent who love the mission and the purpose of what we do here. And yes, for many of them, it's the ability to look a little bit longer.”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I imagine that long view is pretty enticing to folks when you go out to higher engineering talent. The flip side of it is if you go work for one of the big tech companies or even a startup, there's often an equity-based payday at the end of that rainbow. How do you compete with that? Do you have dividends? Do you have equity? How does that work?”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's how we're different. At the same time, we have to be a viable company, right? So we have to make tough choices. We have to do the things that make sense because there is no long-term if you don't take care of the short term. And so we still have to manage results quarter by quarter, year by year, but we can have, I think, a little bit more of a balanced view and a more informed conversation about what's right for Bose amongst ourselves versus with a lot of other voices outside weighing in on that.”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes and no, right? So the beauty of our structure and being private is that we can play a longer game. We don't have shareholders externally and investors that are looking at quarterly results in the same way. And so it gives us the freedom to look out a few years and say, look, we're willing to sacrifice performance a little bit this year because we think this investment is critical to the future of the company. And that's a really great luxury, right? I mean, I think theoretically that's what all companies want to be able to do is they want to be able to make purposeful investments now for the future and not have to shortcut those when the economy swings. So that's a real luxury and I don't take that lightly, right? It's important. And because it is such the core of our mission and purpose, we really”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mentioned also that Bose has a lot of sort of long range research and development work. It's a strength of the company. You've got engineers working on projects that might not come to light for several years. Any public company in the current economic climate would be shutting that down. And you can actually see the big tech companies are cutting costs and doing layoffs. And a lot of it is the metaverse or Amazon yesterday, right? In their hardware and devices group, they made some cuts. Because that stuff isn't going to pay off for a while and they need to focus on the present. Are you under that same pressure? Do you feel that same pressure to say, okay, this stuff isn't coming true for 10 more years, we've got to be focused on what will be successful right now.”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it's actually part of the gift that the intent, what Dr. Bose was really trying to do was to create a structure where Bose would remain private. And the reason for that is, you know, he wanted the company to continue to innovate and to continue to focus on research that could make people's lives better. He wasn't specific that it had to be audio experiences, but he was very specific about research and innovation being the purpose of the company. That's really important, right? That grounds us. It's really special actually to have a purpose like that that's so unique and inspiring and different. And I think he recognized that, you know, if both Bose got swallowed up and became a public company or got swallowed up by a bigger public company, that purpose would get eroded over time. And so he wanted to protect that. And so the structure.”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's definitely a unique structure and one of the things that I think joining Bose takes a minute to really understand how it works. It's both very different and then in some ways not that different. So as you might know, Dr. Bose gifted shares of the company to MIT. So our largest shareholder is MIT. Their shares are non-voting and so they don't participate in the operations of the company or selecting the board or anything like that. And the company is governed therefore in a pretty different way because of that. At the same time, we have a board. The board functions pretty similarly to a public company board or a different private company board. And so on a day-to-day basis, it doesn't feel different. When you really step back and think about it, it's quite different than what's typical. But on a day-to-day basis and in terms of interaction with the board, it's pretty standard.”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the same way I just described, right? I brought a whole bunch of thoughts, I listened a lot, I brought a whole bunch of people into the room. My leadership team worked through it to get to the decision. It was kind of a, you know, the group worked through it. I used the board in the same way, right? I mean, I think your board is an important part of informing really big changes. And so certainly involve them in it. And then it's a question of just how do you sequence the things that you want to change, right? You can't change everything at once. And so what's the right sequence?”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just put that into practice for me. You show up, you're the new CEO. This is two years ago. You take a look at things and say, okay, I've got to restructure the company. We've gotten too siloed. There's too many different product divisions, probably some redundancy of effort. I'm going to a functional organization. How did you make that decision?”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe it is a very different way of thinking about decision making, but that's the way, certainly the way I operate my senior team and the way that we're changing a little bit the culture it bows in terms of how we make decisions.”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Informed debate, challenge each other, use facts, call out when you don't agree, right? Disagree in the room. And lots of companies have ways of talking about that, right? Disagree and commit. And, you know, we've heard them all. But this idea of being willing to have the messy debate is really important because you can get all the right people in the room. And then if the most senior or perceived, powerful person in the room starts off, states what we're going to do, no one else actually gets a chance to voice what matters. And so this idea of informed debate is really important. And then the third is something that we talk about, which is purposeful speed. You can't draw that out over months, right? Those things I just described can be done in 30 minutes or three months. And so we happen to participate in a market that moves pretty quickly. And so for us making those decisions with purposeful speed is critically important. And so that.”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It took really good question. It's a hard one to answer, right? I think there was a moment in management history where the answer was, you know, let's just make a chart of who the decider is. And then that's the way we'll make great decisions is we'll just be clear on who the decider is. And obviously that's important in some instances. What I like to focus on is two things, maybe three things. One is getting the right people in the room, right? Great decisions are made when the right voices are part of the discussion that leads to the decision, right? Making decisions in isolation without all the right information is dangerous. And so I think the first part of how I make decisions certainly and how I want the organization to make decisions is get everybody who has a voice in the room so you hear the diversity of perspectives to inform the decision. So that's one, get the right people in the room. The second is something that at Bose were calling”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think what you see from us now is more of a shift to this more emotional connection to the brand around sound and the power of sound, which we think really resonates with our customers. And so we're excited about that transformation, right? I think we're getting a better understanding of who the Bose customer is, why they love Bose and how we draw in new customers to Bose who want to have that same experience over time.”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That can be for someone, right? If you think about the memories you have, they almost all have music attached to it or movies attached to it or something that is visceral about sound that connects you to that memory, to a family occasion, to a date night or a dinner or the birth of your children. And the connection that sound has to our emotions is pretty powerful. We've been creating that emotional connection for people for decades, but we've tended in the past to market more around technology and innovation and the specifications of the product, not the specific specifications, but why technically it's superior.”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that we're thinking about marketing very differently at Bose. So the first hire I made when I joined Bose was Jim Mollika, who's our chief marketing officer. He's actually the first chief marketing officer that Bose has ever had, which I find to be a remarkable statistic given how powerful the Bose brand is. The Bose brand was built through remarkable products, right, and decades of high quality audio experiences that consumers were having either in their car or in their home or increasingly on the go with headphones and wearables. And so marketing has changed a lot. And that felt like a place where we needed to invest to bring our marketing capability to a different level. And so if you sort of look at what we're doing today, we're doubling down on this idea that Bose is all about sound. We talk internally about the power of sound and how transformative.”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our thinking on the kinds of products and experiences that we can deliver to customers. And so I think it's not one or the other. It's sort of the diversity of that group and the diversity of the thinking that you bring together, which is where we create real disruptive new innovation.”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it is, and we are definitely moving in that direction. I think what I like is that we've got this really great push and pull between product and engineering, right? So I think for some organizations, you sort of create a hierarchy and you say one of those organizations tells the other one, you know, kind of what to do. Ours is much more of a partnership, which I think really works well for us because you've got, if you're too product-led and you're too focused on driving, you don't look far enough into the future. The great thing about researchers is that they're not thinking about tomorrow or next year. They're thinking pretty far in the future. And so, you know, you get this dynamic where we're creating a cross-functional team that's got product representation and design and marketing and research and development. And it's the diversity of thought that those different disciplines bring together, which is what we believe is really pushing.”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bose was started well before Silicon Valley product management had defined itself. Now Silicon Valley product management It's like a cliche. It's like how every company wants to run because Google happens to be a huge rich company. Is that what you, and I don't mean to denigrate it? I think there's great value in having product managers and designers and engineers all working together. But that way of working has become basically dominant since the big companies have become dominant. It's not the only way of working. Is that the way that you've adopted you're saying, okay, we're going to do product managers and chief product officers and we're going to have an engineering organization that works with them and cross-functional teams because that can't be how both started because this way of working is maybe 25 years old at most.”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, that those product leaders can shop from. It's pretty exciting. And so one of the changes we've made is to really strengthen our product organizations with a chief product officer over all of our consumer audio products and then on the automotive side as well, having someone who leads that automotive team as well. So that sort of moving to a functional structure, but still keeping that close alignment with the customer.”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other is probably from a product standpoint. Hardware companies and certainly Bose, Dr. Bose was such a Renaissance founder, as many founders are, right? He really was the chief engineer, he was the chief product officer, and he was the chief marketing officer. He sort of played all of those roles. And over time, as he moved away from the company and, you know, leadership changed, it really became an engineering-led culture, not surprisingly. But in the world we live in today, having strong product leadership is so critical to make sure you're getting the experiences right that drive the technical work and you kind of have this push pull between a product organization that is creating the vision for what the consumer needs and a very strong research and engineering culture that is bringing forth great new technology almost”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What have you changed? I'll do both at once just for efficiency sake. So at the highest level, we're functionally organized at both. But I think what's important in there is why we've chosen to do it that way and how we make sure we maintain a maniacal focus on the customer in a functional organization, right? Which is always the risk if you have a functional organization that you somehow lose sight of the customer and then you swing back to a more divisional structure, right? That's the typical sort of academic view of things. So at Bose, we've adopted a functional organization. And I think the final stage of that, which we went through about a year ago, was with our engineering team. And so historically, we had engineering that was more broken up across our different business units. So think about our consumer business versus”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know the exact split, but we definitely have a lot of software engineers. And I would say there's two things that create the magical experiences, right? One is the software that we've been talking about. And our software engineering team has been growing. And yes, our cybersecurity team is growing and we think about all of those things, of course. The other thing that's really important is sort of the holistic systems engineering of how you position the hardware components to enable the best experience. And so there's still a lot of hardware magic that has to happen to bring that whole system together. But for sure, if you look at the trajectory, the mix of our engineers has shifted over time, like everyone else's, and we have a lot of software engineers at both.”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, a classic decoder question I ask whenever this sort of idea comes up is once you start shipping computers, you kind of inherit a bunch of computer problems. You get a lot of capability. as you're describing right you have the compute you have a chip small enough and low power enough to do something accustomed to an in ear in real time That's mind blowing if you remember computers long ago. Right now it might be what everyone expects, but I agree that that's mind-blowing. That means you have to issue software updates. It means you have to think about malware potentially. It means you have to have a lot of software engineers. Almost every hardware company CEO that I've talked to that says they've started shipping software eventually says, oh, we actually have more software engineers than hardware engineers What's the split at Bose?”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The noise cancellation for the average consumer, and it works pretty well for everyone. But what we realized is the most important thing about sound happens to be geometry. The shape of the room that you're in, and in the case of an earbud, the shape of your ear canal. And so what custom tune does and what enables it is the ability to do that compute at the edge is it allows us to play a tone, map your ear canal, and then do a whole lot of math very quickly to customize the noise cancellation and the audio performance to the unique geometry of your ear. That's something that you could have imagined a decade ago, but you couldn't have done because you need the compute power to enable you to do that.”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a way, right, if you think about the earbuds I'm wearing or any product that you use today, the majority of the experience in a headphone today is being created by software. And that's been true for a while, right? You know, DSP is not a new concept in terms of the way that we create audio products. And so we've been layering software into our products for a very long time. What's happening now is with more compute capability, the sophistication of that software at the edge in my ear is getting more and more sophisticated and allowing us to do things that create better and better experiences. So a great example of that is our Quite Comfort Earbuds 2, which are the ones that I happen to be wearing today. They have a technology called Custom Tune Technology. The cool thing about Custom Tune is noise cancellation since its invention has been an optimization to the average. And so your optimization.”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I tend to think of it from the customer first and then back, which is, you know, for me, it's how do we use technology to create better experiences for customers, right? And those experiences could be the audio experiences, the noise canceling experiences. You can't get those experiences without hardware, right? So we're just as much a hardware company as we always have been, but it's using software to build sort of the magic around that that really creates new and better and differentiated experiences. And then similarly, how do we use technology to make the customer experience at every touchpoint better, right? So definitely when you interact with your headphones or your car audio or the speakers in your home, but also when you interact with us, when you reach out to customer service or you shop on bows.com or you interact with Bose in any way. And so I tend to think about, you know, how does technology make the consumer experience better? And then we work backwards.”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there's a big idea embedded in the phrase digital transformation, which I think people use that phrase a lot. Whenever I hear it, I just mean we're going to replace a bunch of stuff with computers. Software is a bunch of stuff that's happening. We're going to go from a bunch of mechanical engineers modeling out wave radio baffles to there's a computer. It's going to do some AI stuff and tell you what you want to hear. in the broadest sense what digital transformation means is that what you think git means like that's what i think it means but is that your view of it that this company is getting computerized and what it makes now is computers and that's the the process that you're in charge of managing”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what I had learned kind of even through the first couple of conversations is just the culture and the talent at Bose is just so special that it's a place you want to be, right? It's an intellectual culture, a smart culture, and a passionate culture. And so, you know, those three things drew me to Bose. I think my experience that got me here is really all about digital and software transformation and how digital technologies are transforming business. You know, if you kind of draw a thread through everything I've done in my career, that's probably the red thread you would draw through it. And I think that's fundamentally the experience I'm bringing to Bose that's really important.”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel very lucky, actually. You know, it's such an amazing brand, right? If I think about when I first got the call, right? And I first started the process to think about coming to Bose, I anchored on three things that are hard to find in a company, right? One was the innovation culture that I've already talked about, right? It's difficult to create that. And having almost 60 years of history of bringing really groundbreaking innovation to the market is pretty amazing. I love that. It's just such a great brand, right? You mentioned your first experience with the brand. My first experience was a wave radio that I saved money to buy when I was in graduate school and I had a tiny apartment. And it was just this magical moment, you know, being able to kind of bring that into my home. And so we all have kind of our first bows moment, which is pretty exciting. That brand has a ton of power. And I think resonates in a unique way with consumers and still does today, obviously.”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So those are the three noise cancellation, immersive audio, which I kind of want to push on because there's a lot going on in that space recently. It seems like there's always a lot going on in that space and it's hard to make that sale historically, but I'm curious about it. And then hearing what you want, which the FDA has just released some rules about hearing aids. There's a lot of hearing augmentation happening in the world. So those are the three I do want to talk about them, but I want to start with what I think of as the decoder questions.”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Noise cancellation was this amazing thing that started with just taking away as much of the noise as you possibly could. Hearing what you want is a more nuanced view that says in some situations there are noises I want to hear and others that I don't. And how do we use technology, AI in particular, to pick out which sounds you want to hear and which ones you don't, and automatically make those adjustments for you? So we really focus on those three technology franchises from early research all the way through development and into products. And so it's really those three technologies that differentiate Bose today. And yes, we're still thinking about how do we take those technologies and push them through to different products and experiences for our customers.”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's pretty much the same. So we're really focused on, we call them technology franchises, and there are three of them today not surprise you, right? The first one is noise cancellation, right? Bose invented noise cancellation over 20 years ago, those headsets that we all loved when we got on planes in the late 90s, early 2000s, and still love, right? So we think there's a ton more about noise cancellation that is to yet be invented. And so franchise one is noise cancellation. Second one is lifelike immersive audio like the artist intended it, right? So the kind of audio that makes you feel like you're hearing what the artist wanted you to hear and you feel immersed in its mood changing and altering and magical. And the third franchise a little bit different and nuanced and is actually made possible by new technology like AI, which is something we call hearing what you want. And so”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, just that first piece Dr. Bose, right? He invented some technology. It was wave, the wave radio was very famous. It was the Bose product that sort of defined the 80s and 90s. He invented it. There was a patent. He built an entire product portfolio around it. Things have changed dramatically since then. I don't think you still sell wave radios at the rate used to sell wave radios. Is that still the basis of the company, though? We're going to invent some core technology and expand that into a series of product lines? Or is it different?”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think in many ways Bose is the same and yet very different than it's been the last almost 60 years. So Bose was founded almost 60 years ago by Dr. Bose, professor at MIT. And the core of it was innovation. It was meant to be a company that could focus on research and innovation and bring technology to the market that has real impacts on customers. The great thing is that part of the company is still alive and well today. That's really at the core of who we are as a culture and as a company. So in that way, quite the same. Obviously the first products were speakers, consumer audio, and that's still pretty much what we do today, right? But everything else has changed around it, the market, the competitive set, the technology we're using obviously is very different and very much advanced today versus where we started. But there's a lot that's the same, which is pretty exciting.”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm really excited to talk to you. Vose is a fascinating company. It's a household name. It's the speaker brand I aspired to as a teen. It's been around for a long time. It has this really long, really interesting history, but it's also privately held. We don't get a chance to look under the hood of a company like Bose very often. How would you describe Bose today?”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Partnerships. Lila is also a relatively new CEO for both. She's been there for just over two years. So we also talked about how she's changed the company and how she decided to shake up the orc chart. I mean, it's Decoder, after all. Two notes before we start. One, Lila talks a lot about functional and divisional corporate structures because she shifted Bose from a divisional structure where every product line had its own complete dedicated team to a functional structure where the companies organized by capabilities like engineering, design, and marketing functional versus divisional structures actually come up a lot on Decoder if you're on the lookout for it. They're basically the two ways to organize a company and CEOs have to choose. We talked about it a lot with Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky as well. That's a really fun episode if you want more. Second, Lila says DSP a lot. That's just digital signal processor. They're the chips that make audio products go.”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lila still has to compete against big tech for talent and products and for compatibility. See, big companies like Apple and Google and Samsung and Amazon, they're all aggressively chasing audio and they're creating proprietary headphone systems for their phones and smart assistants. Meanwhile, the car audio market is hyper-competitive, and it's in a period of rapid change as cars become computers. So I wanted to know how Lilo was thinking about Bose's dependence on platform vendors like Apple and Google, how she's thinking about standards like Bluetooth, what the limits of her innovation are with all of those forces arrayed against her, and where she thinks she can compete and win against AirPods and other products that get preferential treatment on phones. We also talked a lot about Bose's move into hearing aids. A recent bill signed by President Biden deregulates and opens up the hearing aid market. And Lila has a lot of thoughts about how Bose can participate in that market through.”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Patel, editor in chief of the Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking to Lila Snyder. She's the CEO of Bose. Now, Bose is one of the most recognizable audio brands in the world. It was famous for the wave radio in the 80s when I was a kid. It invented noise cancellation. You can see its logo on NFL sidelines every Sunday. And of course, there are the extremely popular consumer products like the Quiet Comfort headphones. Reviewers like the Virgus Chris Welch say those headphones are some of the best in the entire game. Audio systems in GM, Honda, Hyundai, Porsche, and more have developed and tuned by boats. Baboz is also a fascinating company. It was founded in 1964 by Dr. Amar Bose, who donated a majority of shares of the company to MIT where he was a professor. That means to this day, Bose is a private company with no pressure to go public.”
2022-11-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT