TC Tom Conrad Runs Sonos as CEO, a job he took on full time in mid-2025 after eight months as interim, following the company's 2024 app redesign backlash.

“no spouse has ever said, I wish my husband was on his phone more. I wish my kid used their iPad more.”

Decoder with Nilay Patel · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · September 2026

Context

The Sonos CEO was walking through forty years of failed attempts to make technology the center of the home, from the personal computer through mobile. His point is that mobile won by being all-consuming rather than by being wanted, and that the household verdict on it is not ambiguous. Nilay Patel pushes him immediately afterward on where that argument leads for Sonos.

Listen to the episode → More from Tom Conrad → More Tech Strategy & Big Tech quotes →

Transcript

Decoder with Nilay Patel Around 57:31 into the episode

Tom Conrad

Yeah. You don't want to be the partner that put in the internet connected light switches that don't work when the internet is down. But it's not just the

Nilay Patel

internet connected light switches. It's the logic of making it all work together.

Tom Conrad

…bit of the home. And then, and then we got mobile. Mobile is supposed to be the thing that you engage with when you leave your house on your way to work. And of course, the fundamental, the media of mobile is so addicting that it's all consuming. We use it at work. We use it at home. We use it all the time. But my observation about our use of it in the home is like, nobody loves it. Nobody, no, no spouse has ever said, I wish my husband was on his phone more. I wish my kid used their iPad more. And so we're looking for ways to get beyond that. And to your point, the other compute that's in the home, like a setup box is largely just sort of a web browser to a bunch of services that lives in the cloud. I think it's pretty interesting, actually, that in 17 million homes, Sonos is like an actual mesh of compute in your house with real horsepower, real memory, real CPU, real capability…

Nilay Patel

i feel like you're you're this close to being like and then the teslas will be a data center like there's something there that is like maybe the line i actually

Tom Conrad

want

Nilay Patel

to to to push on that a little bit the initial sonos innovation a hundred years ago right when a company started was oh we can build a mesh network right we can do wireless audio at scale we can synchronize the latency of all the speakers so it sounds like the same music playing at the same time…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from Decoder with Nilay Patel

“Make it less evil, and people will adapt and adjust and understand this. And the companies are complicit in this sense of we can do what we want because we're so big. And Americans, when they go to vote, want people who are going to stand up and not just roll over.” — Kathy Hochul, Decoder with Nilay Patel

“My view is more hands-off. Innovate, do good things, sell your product. Great. This is called capitalism in America. But when they go too far or they don't self-regulate using data that they know internally and ignore it and think they can get away with it, that's where we are today.” — Kathy Hochul, Decoder with Nilay Patel