YouSaid · the spoken record

Patrick Spence

lines on the record: 68
first: 2022-03-01
most recent: 2022-03-01
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 pick lawyers, not law firms. And I think it's a very important distinction because there are lots of wonderful law firms, but it's really who is that thought partner going to be at the firm, someone who's really going to appreciate and understand the nature of our business and then apply all the appropriate legal principles and someone who I have a lot of faith in or a team that I have a lot of faith in on the IP side. We've been joined at the hip with a small boutique in the Midwest that comes from where Mark Triplett, our head of IP, resides. They understand our patent portfolio at an incredibly deep level. And then we coupled them with a major firm, ORIC, which has a reputation as, if not the absolute best IP firm in the country, one of the very best. And I've known one of the senior partners there in this area for, it's got to be 30 years now. And so it's that combination of experts.”
2022-03-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Inside Sonos' decision to sue Google with CEO Patrick Spence and CLO Eddie Lazarus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“De Sono story resonates. That's why we've been asked to testify on the hill. That's why we've been asked to go in to see people in the White House. So that makes my job a lot easier and it lowers our investment costs because, yes, we have lots of lawyers that we hire to litigate around the world. But our costs in telling our story on the antitrust front or to the extent we do media around the IP work and how we defend our innovations, frankly, it's a very small band.”
2022-03-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Inside Sonos' decision to sue Google with CEO Patrick Spence and CLO Eddie Lazarus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One thing I just mentioned is that we have an incredibly small team that works on this. We don't have a single lobbyist. Not one Sonos employee on the ground in Washington, D.C. We don't have anybody regulatory people in Europe. It's really the Sonos story that does the work for us. I have one fellow on my team who works part-time with me on the policy stuff. Otherwise, it's just me. I guess I have the advantage of having been born and raised in Washington, D.C.”
2022-03-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Inside Sonos' decision to sue Google with CEO Patrick Spence and CLO Eddie Lazarus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To do to stand up, for instance, in the Google situation for our intellectual property. And remember, a big part of Eddie's team is on the intellectual property side. And so actually patenting the inventions that are there and collaborating with the engineering team, right? And that is, I would say, that's why your intellectual property people are here, because they love the products as much as all of us do. And they want to make sure that we are protecting those inventions because we know that this is a big, exciting space and more and more people may want to copy those.”
2022-03-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Inside Sonos' decision to sue Google with CEO Patrick Spence and CLO Eddie Lazarus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I would go back to start from the fact that innovation is at the core of everything we do. So we have a long conversation on innovation and how much we need to be investing to continue to drive our business, right, and grow our business. And we're proud that we've been able to do that for the 17 years going on 17 years. We've shipped products, right? Is grow every single year despite all the new entrants jumping in to what we knew would be a big growing market. We continue to grow and be successful in that. And so that is job one. And that is where 99% of my time goes. And then Eddie and I have a conversation with Brittany, our CFO, around, okay, what's the right investment to make here? But it's really led from the strategy of what do we want to achieve in that particular area. And so we look at it, and Eddie obviously looks at what do we need to serve the business, but then we as well say, okay, what do we need?”
2022-03-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Inside Sonos' decision to sue Google with CEO Patrick Spence and CLO Eddie Lazarus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think that is true for many of us. So investing in engineers and hardware tooling, right, just kind of on the spreadsheet, you can see, okay, if we get this right, it'll pay off, right? This will generate revenue in the end. Poor Eddie's over there, the lawyers just cost you money. They rarely make money for any company unless you run a law firm. How do you think about, okay, Eddie needs resources to go talk to Congress to fight patent lawsuits? Eddie, how big is your team?”
2022-03-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Inside Sonos' decision to sue Google with CEO Patrick Spence and CLO Eddie Lazarus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those customer problems to solve. And I just haven't seen the technology yet applied in a way that there's an aha moment for consumers, right? And so we'll keep an eye on it, you know, see what develops in that particular area. But that's kind of what I'm looking for is, you know, actual customer problems being solved by this as opposed to technologies that potentially hold a lot of promise because you and I over the last 20 years have seen there's always lots of technologies and lots of philosophical discussions about what they might do. But when it comes down to brass tacks, what problems are we actually solving is something I'm still trying to figure out with some of the Web3 technologies?”
2022-03-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Inside Sonos' decision to sue Google with CEO Patrick Spence and CLO Eddie Lazarus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're watching the whole Web3 area to see what its impact on music and the industry will be at this point. But for me, the real test with Web3, blockchain, all of these areas is what's been built that solves a customer problem in a better way. And I hear a lot about the technology, obviously from my perspective, I get kind of into that and I love to see the new technology and talk about some of the possibilities. But at the same time, I'm really looking for”
2022-03-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Inside Sonos' decision to sue Google with CEO Patrick Spence and CLO Eddie Lazarus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's right. From everything I've seen, I think that is right. And you want to keep, I think we've created a world in where customer expectations continue to increase as well. And so you want to be bringing out new features and functions and making sure you're making it better over time. Wi-Fi networks are changing, all of these things. And so it is an evergreen investment. And then the other thing that most companies like ours are thinking is other areas you can go. And so you're always investing ahead of the curve as well. And so we're hiring people in software to go into new areas that we're not in today. And so that's the other thing that I think if you looked at it, it's easier in hindsight because then you understand, oh, they were working on all of these great things. We just didn't see it at that moment in time.”
2022-03-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Inside Sonos' decision to sue Google with CEO Patrick Spence and CLO Eddie Lazarus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's about two thirds software and about a third hardware right now. So that's kind of the mix of our, you know, on the engineering side. And I think that's a surprise to most people, right? In terms of how many people are there. But you know it is the magic of Sonos and the way the system works together. It really is the core of the system and why we can introduce new products that make the system better over time.”
2022-03-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Inside Sonos' decision to sue Google with CEO Patrick Spence and CLO Eddie Lazarus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I try to know all the names and the backgrounds as much as I can. I do like to keep it. I try to keep it as small as possible in terms of that feeling culturally, but it's hard, certainly at this number.”
2022-03-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Inside Sonos' decision to sue Google with CEO Patrick Spence and CLO Eddie Lazarus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We shifted that. So I'll say a couple things on that. One is we started to hire from anywhere, and that's been tremendous in terms of tapping into new talent pools. And I think a lot of people have kind of gone through this period and reevaluated where they want.”
2022-03-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Inside Sonos' decision to sue Google with CEO Patrick Spence and CLO Eddie Lazarus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think we're just at the beginning of the opportunity ahead with such a big market to go after. And a lot of new categories we don't play in yet.”
2022-03-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Inside Sonos' decision to sue Google with CEO Patrick Spence and CLO Eddie Lazarus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like the team's done an incredible job. You know, it was probably an advantage that we were distributed from the start starting simultaneously in Santa Barbara, Boston, adding Seattle along the way, obviously Amsterdam. We've had China in the mix, Malaysia now as well. And so when the pandemic struck as well, we were able to more easily shift because we are already using video chat, all of the things that so many companies picked up in the pandemic. That was already normal course of operating for us. And so you also saw during the pandemic, we didn't lose any steam in terms of our new product introductions. We've been doing two new products a year and the team's done an incredible job. So, you know, I'm the kind of person where I think the action speak louder than words. So just look at our track record and kind of the actions that we have taken over the last five years. And I'm super proud of the team.”
2022-03-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Inside Sonos' decision to sue Google with CEO Patrick Spence and CLO Eddie Lazarus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Else out there with our business model in the sense that we bring out products which our existing customers buy more of. They tell their friends and family to join Sonos and then we keep introducing at least two new products a year that help bring more people in, increase the products per home, and we kind of have this flywheel that goes and goes through it. But it's been cultural change throughout the entire organization. So whether it's product or go to market, but we've really kind of ramped up our activity. We've just moved faster, quite frankly. And obviously we've started to get into new categories as well. And that's an important part of it because I think the other thing is we'll do roughly $2 billion in sales this year. The global audio market is $89 billion a year in sales. And so there's a lot of room for us to seize more opportunity. And I think we do it in a unique way, right? Like I keep saying we're the story of software eating audio. And that's a lot of room to run to take more and more of that 89 billion dollars.”
2022-03-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Inside Sonos' decision to sue Google with CEO Patrick Spence and CLO Eddie Lazarus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We really set out an ambition to deliver two new products a year going from at that point, I think it was one product over the past couple of years or, you know, and kind of haphazardly. And so it was really this intentional bias to action to ship products that we felt could add to the system and be of high quality, but at the same time, not get into the cycle that some companies are in of just shipping the same stuff every year and these kind of things. And so I felt that was a good balance for really what we try to do. And so we structured the entire organization around that. So now, you know, we have at my leadership level, we have three different product leaders, actually four in the conversation. We've made it very product centric in terms of what we're doing. And you can see it's working in our results and our model and our system is working, right? Like the biggest thing at the end of the day is how we're different than everybody.”
2022-03-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Inside Sonos' decision to sue Google with CEO Patrick Spence and CLO Eddie Lazarus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I'm glad to have you both. Sonus is in the middle of a few kind of big policy issues in tech. There is the ever-present patent litigation discussion that happens. There's antitrust law. You both have testified before Congress of the United States recently. You recently won part of a patent lawsuit against Google. The result didn't actually Google speakers changing some functionality. I want to talk about all of that specifically. I want to talk about as the CEO and chief legal officer how you make decisions to engage that function as part of your company's operations. But we got asked the decoder questions. We got to start at the start. Patrick, you took over in 2017 as CEO. You and I have talked a bunch of times since then. One of the things you have mentioned to me over the years is your desire to change the culture of Sonos when you first started, to make it a more nimble organization. I think your phrase is biased to action, which I have.”
2022-03-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Inside Sonos' decision to sue Google with CEO Patrick Spence and CLO Eddie Lazarus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nehlay Patel, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week, I sat down with Patrick Spence. He's the CEO of Sonos, who's joined by Eddie Lazarus, the Sonos chief legal officer. Now, I wanted both Patrick and Eddie on the show to talk about when a company like Sonos makes the decision to head to the courts and increasingly Congress to protect its business. Sonos has long accused other tech giants of stealing its tech, but in 2020, it actually sued Google for patent infringement. Sonos said that it had disclosed details about how its technology worked during negotiations to integrate Google's voice assistant and that Google had copied the tech and then released cheaper products it subsidized with revenue from search advertising. So this recently won that patent lawsuit at the US International Trade Commission, which”
2022-03-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Inside Sonos' decision to sue Google with CEO Patrick Spence and CLO Eddie Lazarus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT