Season 3, Episode 3: The Sonos IPO
Acquired
Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal
4.8 • 2.9K Ratings
🗓️ 20 August 2018
⏱️ 98 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ben and David are (almost) live on the scene covering the plucky Southern California “camera company”… uh wait, wrong episode… we mean *speaker* company’s IPO! Continuing the long Acquired tradition of analyzing companies at the intersection of music, tech and business, we discuss the past, present and future of Sonos in world where speakers actually now… speak!
Sponsors:
Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvanta
Statsig: bit.ly/statsigacquired
Modern Treasury: https://bit.ly/acquiredmoderntreasury
Links:
Carve Outs:
- Ben: Andy Rachleff on the Invest like the Best podcast
- David: Brotopia by Emily Chang
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Re-Cord. |
| 0:02.0 | All right. |
| 0:03.0 | Where does the word record come from? |
| 0:05.0 | We record again. |
| 0:07.0 | Yeah, chord again. |
| 0:08.0 | That's great. Great. Welcome to Season 3 episode 3 of Acquired, the show about technology acquisitions and |
| 0:28.7 | I'm Ben Gilbert, I'm David Rosenthal and we are your hosts. Today we are covering the |
| 0:35.1 | IPO of a company that has devices littering my home in the most wonderful way |
| 0:39.3 | Sonos. So Sonos was founded with a clear mission and that was to fill every home with music |
| 0:46.8 | or so says their S1 and today we will decide based on their very recent IPO |
| 0:52.3 | last month you know how to go and we will forecast |
| 0:55.6 | what does it look like in the future for this IPO to sort of look like an A-plus in |
| 1:00.9 | retrospect and you know what does it look like if it was a failure in retrospect and what are the things that have to evolve in the landscape of home audio and in the actions of the company in order to play out either of those scenarios. |
| 1:15.1 | It is a unusually clear and compelling mission. |
| 1:19.7 | May or may not have been the company's original mission. You'll just have to tune in to find out. |
| 1:24.4 | So I want to start with some fun facts because I think they're very interesting about the company. |
| 1:28.4 | So the first one is Sonos did not sell a speaker until seven years into the company's existence, which is a little shocking |
| 1:35.6 | based on the company that we know today to think about, you know, two years of no product |
| 1:40.3 | and then five years of non-speaker products really just bridges amplifiers ability to bring |
| 1:45.3 | non... To bring digital music to any home in your room. |
| 1:50.5 | And then here's another just banana stat to tell you how loyal the customer base is and how much Sonos invests in their backwards compatibility. |
| 1:57.5 | 93% of the speakers that it has sold over the last 13 years are still active today. |
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