Name: Sonos CEO Talks up IPO and 'Long-Term' Interests for Company
Uploaded: 2018-08-02
Duration: 4 min 31 s
Description: Sonos shares jump 32 percent on Nasdaq IPO debut

[ MUSIC ] [ APPLAUSE ] [ APPLAUSE ] Patrick, Sonos has been around for 16 years. It is not a tech start up and yet here you are at the NASDAQ selling your shares to the public for the first time ever. Why was this IPO so important to you? We've really been hard at work for 16 years building a home sound system that people absolutely love. And we've just achieved some amazing things to this point. But we actually think we're just at the beginning of a next phase where we're gonna be able to do even bigger things. And so we felt like it was a good time after scaling the business to a billion dollars in revenue. And seven million homes that we are in today, that is a good time to kinda step on the world stage if you will. Here at NASDAQ And kind of take that next step, as an organization. So that's really what today was all about. You priced your shares at $ 15, which was $ 2 below the range that you had been marketing to investors, and so you're raising less money as a result of that. What change Why did you do that? We found that people were nervous given the state of the market is the way I would put it. And so we took I think the right move. And look, we think about these things for a long term, it doesn't really matter where it trades today, it matters where it's gonna be in a year, five years 50 years. Well, when it comes to tech OPOs, investors wanna own high growth stocks. And looking at the financials for Sonos, revenues have been on the weak side. You still haven't had an annual profit Why should investors be excited about Sono stocks? I think you've seen some companies that have come out and delivered a year or two of tremendous growth and then flame out, quite frankly. And so I think the right thing to do to build a valuable company For the next decade is to balance both the growth of the top line and the profitability so that you build a strong, flexible organization. So if we find an area that we want to be able to invest in, we can actually go and do that. So we're building, thinking about that long term. Everyone is talking about voice activated speakers. This is getting to be the next big thing in your industry but we're also seeing that the big tech guys like Apple and Amazon and Google are getting into this field. How do you compete against them? Well they've been our partners for a decade as well you know we have all those All those tech giants have put their music streaming services on our platform. That's why people love it because they can easily access all the music streaming services on Earth. And now we're doing the same thing on voice. So we've already put Amazon's Alexa on our system. Later this year we'll have Google Assistant. And we will put all the services consumers want on one platform which I think is in the long term interest of the consumers. But this is kinda tricky, because you have relationships with Amazon and Google and Apple. Yes, yeah. But at the same time They are your rivals. They are your competitors. How do you navigate that? I don't see them building products that are really oriented on being in a home for five to ten years. I see them building products that give you a taste of the services they're building or supporting other services or products that they build as accessories, almost, in a way Our strategy is to work with these players, take the best services they have and put them onto our platform. And our platform is different than the others because we're orientated to the long- term. And so really, Amazon is a partner of ours. We take Alexa, we put it into the products because we believe it enhances the experience and we also have a unique experience in that we offer all of these services with our products. You're not trapped in one ecosystem, you get them all. What do you see as Sonos's place in this hugely, intensely competitive marketplace, looking ahead. Small and agile is our advantage, and our openness and our ability that need to move faster than some of the other companies. We also beholding given some of the other agendas surrounding services and that kind of things. And so, I think we have everything we need to be very successful in this space. Some people have suggested that SONOS would be a logical acquisition by a company like Amazon or Apple. What do you say to that? I'm very happy and so pleased with everything we've done to be able to get to this point and step onto the public stage. And we're just focused on making sure that we continue to deliver great value to our customers. And now in this next phase as well, making sure we're delivering value to investors. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Sonos CEO Talks up IPO and "Long-Term' Interests for Company

Finance

Sonos shares jump 32 percent on Nasdaq IPO debut