The Sonos Disaster, Act Like a Founder, MMA for Brothers, These Guys Have Exits

0:00Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today, we're doing a deep dive on Sonos. We're trying to get back into the technology side of the brotherhood. We are still displaced. We're still in Santa Barbara. We've upgraded our chairs today. Hopefully, it's a little bit better for you guys. But you know it's bad at Sonos when they bring out Mark Gurman. Are you familiar with Mark Gurman? Tell me about Mark. So he's like the Apple correspondent. He gets all the best leaks. Like when you hear like, oh, new iPhones coming out. Like he's the guy you go to at Bloomberg.

0:31So there's been two articles previously. I'll give you one of these two. Two articles previously on Sonos and the chaos of the company started in August 22, August 22, 2024. Sonos app leaves company racing to save its reputation. And this was by Dave Lee. I'm sure he's a great journalist at Bloomberg. Everyone at Bloomberg is great, but he's not Mark Gurman big. And then on September 23rd, Dave Lee follows up with how Sonos botched an app and infuriated its customers. And so, you know, this is like, you know, some rough reporting. But then they bring out the big guns, Mark Gurman, because the CEO was fired.

1:18And so let's start with what happened. We'll take you through a little bit of the history of Sonos and explain how they got here. Because there are some cool things about this company. we both use the product i both i've loved it at times and more recently i've hated it so uh it's uh it's it's really cool in the off chance that it's working we'll get into that later yeah it's kind of like a lightning striking twice situation when sonos work properly it's been so bad recently yeah just degree to degree and and yeah it's a fascinating story so uh let's read through a little bit of this first report from dave lee in Bloomberg, he says, Sonos has a loyal user base for its high-end audio speakers.

2:00Unfortunately, a disastrous software launch has angered customers and jeopardized the company's reputation, and the window to fix the problem is closing rapidly. The release in May of a new app that controls the speakers was meant to have been the culmination of Chief Executive Officer Patrick Spence's grand plan to refresh the company's infrastructure and expand into a greater share of the$100 billion audio market, of which it estimates it controls less than 2%. The existing Sonos app was struggling to handle all the demands of the modern-day audiophile who wants to listen to sound from various sources, both local and in the cloud, across multiple devices and rooms.

2:38Spence said performance and reliability issues had crept in over time. The new app was flawed, though. Sound drops in and out. Devices disappear. My push for speed backfired, Spence said. In a business like Specialist Audio Trust can be extremely hard to win back. Case in point, Jordy will never buy another Sonos speaker in his life. Probably won't either. On Tuesday, the former BlackBerry executive threw himself into the line. This just turns into an MKBHD, just scathing review. Yeah, I mean, I'll go out. I'll preface some of this by saying, because the only few words I've gotten in so far were dunking.

3:22We don't like to dunk. In this situation, I felt like it was fair because some of my worst experiences with consumer electronics have been with my dear Sonos. But at the same time, Santa Barbara Company, I went to school in Santa Barbara. I know they're doing their best. There are some great moments with Sonos. They do sound good when they're running. it's really the setup yep that is so uh so devastatingly difficult it was magical at first like my first sonos setup was i had a tv and an apple tv plugged into it and are you familiar with hdmi cec no it's a specific protocol over the hdmi cable that allows you to control the device like you can control a tv from the apple tv so right i was able to wire it so that the sonos went into the to the tv and the apple tv controlled the actual tv yeah and so with just one apple tv remote i could push a button and it would turn it on and the audio would work and it'd be surround sound yeah and it was just like flawless yeah and then i think it added on to that i could also like choose to play spotify over and that was great i think i think they almost could have taken the route as being more like encouraging people to hire a sonos expert to set up the product yeah because when i think about it every single time i'd be setting up a sonos device i'm thinking i just wish i could pay somebody to do it you know and there are people that will do it people that do smart home stuff but it's not they make it seem like hey you can just set up this app it's super easy and it's crazy because i don't know the last time i did it was um arlie was uh opening up their new uh oh yeah their new showroom in beverly hills and i yeah i go over there i'm trying to be helpful i'm like okay like i'll set up i'll get the audio working in the sonos and ended up being like you know this is a 90 minute you know sort of setup where i'm it has this thing where you're really wanting to slam the sonos against the wall and i i'm a pretty patient yeah person so during the setup they have this thing where like you put in pairing mode and it's supposed to show up on the wi-fi and it talks and sometimes it gets it perfect and when it works perfectly it's amazing and then other times it'll just be like hey like we're not finding it on the wi-fi like Would you mind connecting it to the main Sonos via an Ethernet cable?

5:46And it's like, no, I don't have a 20-foot Ethernet cable on me right now, bro. This is so unacceptable. And the main thing is just the app got so slow. But the crazy thing is that I heard about this. Obviously, this all started in 2024 last year. And the saga was kind of like a very bad last year. But even just a few years ago, they had such a bad app launch that they needed to deprecate their first app. Like most of the time it's like, oh, Instagram launches Reels. Like you don't have like two Instagram apps on your phone. Yeah. Instagram just updates, right? And that wasn't what Sonos did. They literally have the S1 app and then the Sonos app.

6:27And the S1 app is for older systems. And so go to one house. Here's the thing. Sonos should have gone through YC. As a public company, they'd be like, look, like we really haven't figured. that we don't have this figured out we don't know what people want yeah we need we need we need to help simplifying uh you know one of the one of the narrative violation here with sonos is is that everyone everyone says like hardware is hard you can't build hardware as an american company like dji is crushing um but what did sonos get right like i'm not a super crazy audiophile i'm sure there's audiophiles that will say oh sonos doesn't actually sound that good but to me it sounds fine It sounds nice.

7:04And industrial design, I think it looks fine. I think it looks good. You put it on the wall or you put it in the house. I think it looks nice. I think it's high quality. The actual hardware is never broken on me. I've never had a speaker actually just break or anything. No, it is reliable. Physical hardware is reliable. It's reliable, totally. It's funny because it's just the software. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's the narrative. Normally, it's like America is great at software. We have great B2B software. We're on the frontier of AI software, but we're lagging in hardware. And with this, it's like Sonos delivered on the hardware side.

7:35They did the hard part and then they just couldn't get the app to work, which is crazy. One cool note, they were actually, when they were incorporated, they incorporated it as Rincon Audio. Oh, really? And Rincon, I don't know if you know, is the most iconic surf spot in Santa Barbara. Oh, cool, cool, cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Assuming these guys were spending more time surfing than developing the software once, especially in the later period. It is interesting to compare this. So tying this to something like Anderol, which is making hardware and software for our military, it's hard enough to make speakers that you just plug into a wall, connect to your Wi-Fi, and they just want to play music.

8:21That is difficult to do. And that puts into the context how difficult it is for Anderil to put hardware devices tied to their software into war zones that have electronic warfare happening, new environments, bullets flying, bombs going off, enemies trying to kill you. And sure, every military contractor puts stuff in the field and has issues with it and they try to improve it, but it just goes to show how hard a lot of these new defense tech founders that are coming in saying sonos is a public company with 12 offices a bunch of retail stores hundreds of employees billions of dollars in revenue and they can't even get their speakers to reliably work in their home uh without pissing off consumers right yeah and it's fine for us consumers where i'm like well i have dinner guests coming over and i just want to play music but if you're like trying to operate like an androld drone in the field like that soldier like doesn't have another life yeah if you fuck it up right i would imagine in the culture has just got to be way different though you know andrew it's like yeah there's a different level of seriousness yeah with this it's like it's a 20 year old company it's in santa barbara a little bit more casual not no longer founder mode because the founder stepped down uh yeah and maybe that's part of the problem do you want to get so early deep dives and we can yeah so credit credit to them you know the the areas where they i think they've done well uh they were early 2002 yeah like early to be doing a smart home audio system uh and the design has always been great and the heart and and the we talked about it but the sort of physical reliability of of the actual devices do you know uh the story of what the guy did before so the founder is john mcfarland um and now they do over a billion dollars a year in business and the company was founded back in 2002 when most people were listening to music on cds at that time music streaming was barely a thing there was rhapsody but very few people used it if you wanted surround sound in your house you had to wire it up and drill into your walls and connect the speakers it was expensive like getting a nice sound system in your house yeah 100k and with startups you could start building a collection with like a 300 speaker a thousand dollar sound bar and feel like 5k all in you'd have like a really solid setup yeah um but before he i i don't know where it is but before he started this he owned software.com let's go isn't that a great domain and that company had gone public in 1999 and they merged with phone.com let's go isn't that amazing let's to become openware the major early player in mobile email When the dot-com crash hit, they left and decided to start something new.

11:12Their insight was that wireless networking was the next major wave. After dismissing an idea to do in-flight wireless, they focused on multi-room audio, seeing the rise of MP3s and Napster. People were starting to put Wi-Fi in their homes, so the founders wanted to leverage that to play digital music seamlessly in every room. We got to do a deep dive on the merger between phone.com and software.com. Amazing, amazing. One of the most iconic, two of the most iconic domains of all time. It's incredible. Right up there with chat.com and friend.com. If I was investing in the combined company, I'd be looking at it and saying, all right, well, software.com,$10 million domain minimum.

11:52Phone.com, I give it almost 10 to it. So between the two of them, look, it's a$20 million company. I'm sure it was trading at like$2 billion. Yeah, it was trading at$2 billion. And they probably had nothing under the hood. it would have been extremely hard to do the tb award for domain acquisition of the year during in like 1999 yeah because there was just we should be with flashback yeah yeah yeah the greatest domain acquisition of 1999 we should dress up as like it's just so fathers yeah with wigs i mean i think we've talked about mp3.com they went public with just the domain into business plan no software written that's so hundred million dollars um crazy one one iconic jumping ahead a little bit one iconic moment in sonos history is when they decided to partner with ikea oh really the other consumer product company that makes people want to kill themselves during setup um really an incredible restoration hardware it's serious uh ikea and sonos announced a collaboration to build sonos's technology into furniture sold by ikea so you you after four hours got you've got this you know like set up and then then and the real task begins you're all warmed up and now you've got to set up this smart speaker yeah uh that's really funny uh i didn't notice but they they use this like super famous branding firm to come up with a name lexicon branding uh would and lexicon had come up with the name pentium talk to them swiffer we talked to them briefly about naming the podcast right yeah yeah we ended up with they wanted like a few hundred grand we ended up going with someone more expensive yeah but um it ended up being worth it yeah uh pentium swiffer blackberry powerbook and zune sonos is a palindrome and part of the logo design can be flipped or turned sideways still reading sonos naming agencies have to be like the best the best business models incredible after you get a couple bangers like blackberry and stuff like that it's just like yeah we'll name your company yeah it's you know it's 100 you know it's gonna be like it's gonna be like a million dollars yeah it's gonna take 12 months and then it's just and that's just a group like us being like you know that there's a there's like a whole separate industry of like naming firms just for uh pharmaceuticals you know you always have that because like you you always hear these names like it was zemthic and it's like it sounds like a it sounds like a english word but it doesn't trace its roots from anything like where does it come from and uh i was i was trying to get llms to kind of like create more drug names and it was really hard like it is like somewhat of an attractable problem that like you need you need just a some sort of human to come the names matter a lot but but the sonos name is incredible and i remember first the first time i flipped the speaker over and this and the palindrome like it's the logo reads correctly whether you mount the speaker like this or like this upside down which is actually an amazing feature for a speaker i wonder if you mounted i wonder if it still reads correctly if you throw it off a 20-story building yeah if it shatters into a million pieces can you still i think people know because they're just like oh it's a smash speaker it must be a sonos who frustrated its owner yeah you gotta you gotta calm down with all the robot abuse because when when the robots rise up they're gonna be like this guy is like a serial killer no i respect robots i'm trying to give them guns i'm trying to give them ars we're working on this yeah you know you have In the robot apocalypse, the Sonos speaker will be like the lowest cast.

15:15Have you seen the guy on Instagram that I send you these? He's got ChatGPT hooked up to his guy. Oh, there's something. I'm talking to him in like two hours if you want to jump on. It's going to be great. That's great. Let's go through some other stuff. I mean, for a long time, they were doing really well. 93 % of Sonos speakers that sold in the last 13 years are active today. So people just mount them and then they just stay forever. Active. not for long with given how bad the app is it's so bad uh active and boasting like oh we still we still do over-the-air updates for products even from 2005 and it's like yeah but those work with a different app bro like come on it's interesting normally when you when uh hardware companies the real concern is that you ship you ship hardware that ends up being malfunctional and then you have all this hardware that needs to be replaced yeah and so it's interesting that their problems seem to be just totally opposite of what the typical concern is for hardware founders software is always like oh that's easy we'll just ship updates and fix it yeah but this is a fascinating little timeline so uh 2002 they incorporate they changed their name they were ring con they changed their name to sonos in 2004 so these guys clearly made money in the dot-com boom because they're just like they haven't really raised that much money there's thrown a couple years uh but then they they launched their first prototype which is just it actually links into existing speakers so they weren't even making speakers it was just an amp that then would connect to like whatever speakers you have that's cool and and that still exists and that and that's very cool if you have a if you have a speaker system you can just plug in the sonos thing or at least it used to be before that happened shit but uh uh so it went pretty well walt mossberg called it easily the best music streaming product he had tested it cost 1200 bucks it was expensive sales were slow but they kept iterating in 2006 they added support for rhapsody 20 2007 the iphone arrived before that you had to have like a dedicated sonos controller which is like a good really low budget ipad basically it was cool but it was like really junky it's like a universal remote like it's gonna be crappy um so they launched the iphone controller app in 2008 instead of their hardware controller, much better.

17:32Android app in 2011, three years later. Wow, really disrespectful. I guess Android was pretty new. And then by 2012, they phased out their own controller altogether. In 2009, they released the Play 5, the S5, which is their standalone wireless speaker. This was 400 bucks, and that was in the more mainstream market. And then by 2010, they raised$25 million from Index, and they launched the Play 3 at$299. So they're really going down market and this is when everyone started buying these things they integrated spotify uh and uh in 2012 kkr led 135 million and red point red oh yeah um shout out to logan um i another streaming service they integrated with that that does make sense is they integrated with mog mog what's that is this real yeah no it's real they partnered with over 100 streaming services but mog is interesting to me because the sonos mogs the user so are in the setup that it's just a match it's a match it's a perfect match so i can see why they would partner there okay you you imagine you've gone mog and it's all just like sigma male theme songs like that like it's all uh it's all funk and and drift core everything's slow honestly though but it's it they they you know in 2012 uh they set up uh this was around around the same time they did the kkr round they set up a um uh like an entire sonos studio which was like pretty cool and groundbreaking for a consumer electronics company they had an art gallery they would host different artists uh solange lonely island back things like that but to me it's way cooler that they work with such an iconic private equity firm like kkr i mean yeah to to have kkr buy your equity is the kind of thing that every young man one dream what you know dreams of that might have been where the idea came from to cut costs and stop developing software yeah totally totally i could see them coming in being like okay where are your costs um well why don't you cut the cto the VP of engineering the senior man and every developer take it offshore, no more H1Bs, we're just cutting everything this is a hilarious anecdote so when they launched it all things D this is what 2005 2005 2005 they launched at the all things D conference, this was before Apple had announced the iPhone, before apple had those like major keynotes yeah they were so early you gotta get so early that um uh even though they're not they haven't been early to getting their net income pause there they've been a little late on that but uh but so so so steve jobs is at the all things d conference and he introduced the apple airport express which is the wi-fi router that apple designed and they actually still had good they still had good names back then yeah they got the apple tv the apple tv the apple tv plus apple tv plus app on apple tv they made apple tv plus shows within apple yes yes it's so bad but uh at that conference so steve jobs is uh is announcing the wi-fi router and then uh john uh john mcfarlane is announcing the sonos uh amplifier connected and flair and it's like a match made in heaven like you should go buy both of those because they're both going to work really well uh and but steve jobs is super pissed and he goes up to john at the conference uh he walked up pounded on my chest and said they'd sue us out of existence i push because uh wait so steve jobs goes up to john uh the founder of sonos john mcfarland founder of sonos and basically the sonos the control uh app to control like what music was playing where once you hook up the amplifier it had a scroll wheel that was like derivative from the iphone or from the ipod remember the ipod scroll yeah yeah of course so so they'd use that same design element and steve was like you stole that from us and so he walks up to him pounds him on the chest and says i'll sue you out of existence and john pushes back pointing out that we had no overlap with their patents he checked steve jobs checked realized we were in the clear and the relationship improved after that that's cool but i like that steve jobs just walks up to him he's just like i haven't checked the patents but you're wrong yeah it's funny it's funny because it would have been great for consumers in so many ways if apple had acquired sonno because apple is the best in the world at making it seamless to set up a device and software integration gotten so so so yeah good yeah uh i need to go buy a new iphone at some point this week and i'm not even worried about it i'm gonna get in in and out of the apple store and yeah like you know i mean they eventually launched a competitor so they launched airplay 2 which we had sonos like functionality and then they've launched the uh the home pod and the home pod 2 it is an interesting miss because they had so much legacy as a company in music yep so many iconic campaigns it would have been it would have made sense for apple to like i wish i could have apple speakers on my desk like next to my of course monitor used to be able to and um it does seem again it wouldn't have been a huge business line for them but they probably it's a hundred billion dollar annual revenue yeah opportunity and apple could have probably gotten 20 of that or 10 10 of that at least so it wouldn't have been as big as airpods so patrick when did all the like we should get into the let's get into the drama okay um you know the stuff with google and there was quite a bit with amazon as well was there not uh i'm not sure so patrick spence the ceo who was just fired uh he joined from blackberry in 2012 i know i know it really writes his uh but he was there for over a decade and i guess did pretty well um until what's he bought that what's a status rock fairy right and so yeah i mean the i think the drama you're alluding to is that uh amazon google and apple all realized that well kind of dumb speakers were not particularly critical to their core business strategy and like their value chain once you put the ai assistant in them and you connect them to the internet then they become an important yeah point and i and i we it'd be interesting to understand i think that amazon what want needed to be in the market because they assumed that people would just be walking around their home and be like hey alexa order more paper towels yeah and i i i had an alexa and i actually never i don't have any visceral angry moments with my alexa so they did a good job and they did did well the sound quality was never as good as sonos but they did well in terms of setup and usability um but i think they were thinking okay this is like a new ordering mechanism we're the place that consumers go to purchase yep like we need to be here maybe didn't really turn out to be the case and voice i feel like has just continued to take l after l yeah um even even air chat shut down i don't know if you know that all right um and and people were saying like okay if if this didn't make it this was the best shot on goal for audio like it maybe just isn't the thing yeah um so um but they also had run-ins with google yeah yeah so so basically So the stage, like 2012, they raised that round from KKR.

25:22They launched a$200 speaker. So it's much easier to get into the Sonos ecosystem. And from late 2013 to late 2014, the revenue grew by 75%. So they're really taking off at this time. But then simultaneously in 2014, Amazon announced the Echo and Alexa at$99 for Prime subscribers. Sonos had never considered building its own voice assistant, and the smart speaker era took them by surprise. McFarlane later admitted that they were late to recognize the impact of voice. In mid-2016, Sonos finally announced - Blackberry goes, nobody's ever going to want to type on a glass. It's just not going to happen.

26:01Boom, smart. Sonos is going, nobody wants their speakers to be smart. Our users like that it takes 45 minutes to set up one of your six speakers. I mean, I think just this is another case of like slop being massively underrated. Like, yeah, I think that, you know, I'm not a crazy audio file, but I can tell the difference between like a nice surround sound setup and like an Amazon Echo. So I think he wasn't there. I wasn't. I had never. I've never. I enjoy music. I don't enjoy live music typically just because of the crowds and stuff like that. I rarely go to concerts. Yeah. but um the my neighbor is the biggest audiophile that i've ever met this guy stefan simkowitz he's a pretty high profile art collector uh and um he if you go in his house there's just speakers everywhere like every surface and it is truly incredible but all the stuff he does is he's like this amp is made from this guy in denmark and he makes 10 of these a year and he's been doing it and it's like watchmaking in a way.

27:05So I think we should eventually get. You got to come around on live music. I'll take you to the LA Phil. We'll see Dudamel. The Phil is different. I don't like being in places where there's sweaty strangers. Oh, I'm imagining like a box. Yeah, yeah. Some champagne. Yeah, the Phil. How do people do live music in a different way? Don't act like you've never been to Hard Summer. EDC. EDC. You went to the first EDC, right? No, not the first one. It was a long time ago. Long time ago. I was not born yet. I was not born. It was 2003. Yeah. And so, oh yeah, the other thing is car speakers. Are you familiar with this stuff?

27:51So basically there's this guy that designed the perfect arrangement of speakers. He like ripped out the dash and custom like 3D printed a mold for perfectly placed speakers in a car that where the audio quality is just 10 times better than anything you'd get even like a Bentley or Mercedes or Rolls Royce. But what they found was that when they actually tried to market that technology, no one cared. They all just wanted a headline number, number of speakers, number of ones. Or Bose. Yeah, or Bose. Exactly. by the way yeah i blew out one of the subwoofers in my in my turbo yeah it's so annoying i i i i i kept having to turn down the bass yeah because i was like that just doesn't sound that good it's rattling and then i realized and then i actually made it worse because like i was oh yeah sure sure sure so i have to take it in but hasn't been a priority oh that's brutal i'm so sorry man that's like the roughest thing i've ever heard i mean all right there's people whose houses burned down but i mean you're right out there with them god uh yeah uh so yeah uh send jordy a comment uh tell him thoughts and prayers for his uh broken speaker his turbo uh but yeah i mean uh lots of competition obviously the i i think the success of the alexa and and the google home is just like check the boxes on features and make it super super cheap and you'll just get crazy distribution and people will put up with some of the other other junk yeah i don't it's interesting if you think about how there was a phase where it seemed like people cared about audio and beats by dre was part of this but i don't think that people actually that was still a status symbol right like people just wanted to wear the beats by dre yeah and then um the airpods are the same thing people clear the average consumer clearly does not care about audio quality right they're not optimizing for that that's about signaling to people that you're not afraid of emf exactly you're not afraid to afraid microwave your head exactly i don't live in fear do not live in fear yeah the emfs have a positive effect exactly um but yeah so so this is interesting so in january 2020 sonos um sued google over copyright infringement relating to several patents including the ability to sync audio over multiple devices in august 2021 a judge ruled in favor of sonos the international trade commission also ruled in favor of sonos as a result google was ordered to remove certain features from its devices including group volume control that's got to be so annoying to get ordered by the itc to make your product worse basically um google was ordered to pay Sonos 32 million damages which is literally nothing so I'm sure Google was like okay like whatever however a judge tossed out the verdict in October and criticized Sonos for abusing the patent system following the verdict Google redeployed the features it had previously removed and anyways so not the first or the last Sonos UI or UX innovations that you're just like, I get that you could patent this, but it'd be much nicer if this was just in every app.

31:13Like pull to refresh was one of those. That was actually developed by, I think a company that Twitter bought. And then Twitter said, Hey, we're not going to defend the patent. Like anyone. So now you have Instagram and everybody has it basically. Yeah. It's an interesting thing. I, I, it doesn't. And this, this is, this is dark pattern. This is the kind of stuff like, founders will join yc they never built a company before and they'll go into their first partner meeting whatever and they're like yeah we're filing our patents for this and yc will give you the good advice of being like you should absolutely not do that but it's a total waste of time and money doesn't really matter you can't um and patent stuff is is weird interestingly enough the ridge guys have just dealt with so much of this because they actually have design patents around a physical hardware device and even that they spend like a million a year or more like just like going after people that are just ripping it off through a patent patents on aurora or just on a patent yet i don't i don't actually think i got my first patent approved on what uh breakers breakers first capsule nicotine patch very cool yeah it was a big moment yeah it's like i was that's like that's it that's ip that you can defend it's important because if philip morris tries to come after it you're gonna be able to come after them for like hundreds of millions exactly if they are selling a lot of yeah um but it's fine i still gotta get the tombstone made of like the the plaque when you get like a patent you can go and say like okay i want to buy like a like a trophy yeah yeah i think that'd be good for the office i i don't think of myself as like an inventor but uh it's cool to like have my name on a technically an invention yeah it's just fun A lot of designers in big tech will have gotten on patents at some point.

33:00Even engineers. I know a guy who developed a Google Cloud platform, like their AWS competitor, and he has a ton of patents around how cloud computing works. It's really cool. I think they get a sign to Google. Some interesting thing where you don't own anything related to it, but you get a little crutch from Google. And then he went to another startup and then another one made tons of money. He's all good. He's okay. Anyways, where are they today? Struggling. Stock's down. in 2020 in may 2023 their their revenue they had a 24 drop in revenue yeah they've had a bunch of layoffs which is unfortunate because it is a big employer in santa barbara um and there's not a ton of uh technology companies here um i wonder where they should go like should they get acquired by apple or someone like would that even get through like lena khan's out maybe the antitrust stuff is a little bit looser i don't think apple too late i don't think apple would you would actually buy them now because think about it hey we could spend we already have airpods yeah we have audio devices that do crazy numbers really we had the best you know sonos launched a headphones they launched oh yeah yeah yeah they were like it's like why would i want buggy or headphones yeah i don't know yeah i don't know i think they're they're not gonna get bought by apple because apple could be like well why don't we spend a billion dollars developing a better speaker and sell it through our thousands of stores yeah but i mean they've been doing that and it hasn't really been working like you know yeah but also clearly yeah this is known as isn't working one thing one thing is that the phone the phone kills speakers in so many ways one of them is that i will often just put like that this as the phone speaker has gotten louder oh yeah my need for speakers you just listen to it because like what's the song we use for the ashley vance piece that oh yeah dropped yet the uh right above it yeah yeah all you need is it often in the morning i would go into the kitchen and make my son breakfast and i used to go to sonos and try and put on some music and it got too hard and so i'll just play for my phone seriously it's just like his phone speaker's fine like he doesn't care i don't care whatever i'm just putting on honestly take your sonos hang out with your kids take it apart i used to really i used to really my dad used to do that with uh something like that old electronics with me and my brother he would just say like let's take this apart he'd be like this is this i mean honestly like turning it into a dumb speaker is like pretty good because like yeah this is fine wire them up wire them up turn into you know when you put two cans in a string you know something like needs to be that dumb yeah something like that um anyways i i hope they turn it around i think i think if they just make smarter smart speakers continue to focus on design actually get their software right there's definitely there's definitely a billion dollar revenue business here they've done damage to their brand but i hope they um i hope uh i hope one of these founders comes back and says you know what i'm gonna come i'm gonna buy speaker.com form a new company merge it with sonos do a reverse take private yeah and uh you know come out speaker.com yeah you know run it back because um yeah the founder does uh if spax are back he speaker.com spack it acquire sonos fresh start yeah i mean the real lesson here is like if you're frustrated with being a sonos customer like you'd be better being like a seed seed investor in sonos and have sold at the top yeah just make them just be on the be on the capital side yeah consumer side this is like you were your word of advice to those um the ski patroller was just like try out you know instead of being a ski patroller be you know get into private equity you know launch your own billion dollar fund and just buy a place and yeah the kkr guys are all doing well enough that they can just have a full-time audio engineer on staff and then never hear it.

37:00Yeah. Yeah. Or just a live string quartet. Exactly. That's probably the better solution. Is just have a string quartet in your house. Yeah. And be a patron of the arts, you know, have a guitarist. Yeah. You've used in certain settings. Someone that plays a harp. A drummer. In the morning. A drummer. A drummer. You know, the, the, you know, the, uh, like Peruvian style drum. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. that'd be great having somebody play mute you know the apple alarm clock app i really complained about it it's terrible i'm like dragging this thing around yeah yeah it'd be much it's very it's very confusing where you're like whoa is the alarm on you don't really okay is the volume right like there's a lot of stuff about it that i don't think is great but i really should just stop complaining hire you know somebody to play the violin for like 120 grand a year yeah and all they have to do is just show up and play start playing the violin out my window where i am at worry so you can get the gym yeah um anyways uh interesting company go uh if you're looking to uh for a challenge go buy a sonos it is a great american company and um do you say buy a sonos or buy sonos both both take a private turn them around turn them around i think for our audience the latter will be more relevant yeah that's right um that was great cool let's move on to the timeline let's go to moses kegan he says if you didn't get much from those before you financially morally or whatever you have the opportunity to be a very specific type of hero the founder of your family i i put this in because um i feel like you've been you've been you know tooting this horn beating that drum for a while around creating new rituals traditions and yeah I think it's important I don't want to go out and say that this resonated with me because I think it's a mentality that everyone can have I think it's the same thing if you're an employee act like a founder like how would you what would your founder do in that situation?

39:08Doing agentic and so yeah I don't want to my parents had good traditions and there's a lot that I carry on but at the same time you can creating that family is more than just creating the humans and getting married it's more than about having kids it's about creating the culture and the family and the financials obviously the generational wealth and the trust for sure speaking of deliver neptism you need to be delivering 100 % Nick St. Pierre says,

40:15problems so i'll take this one step further i think this would be great as a parent kid class right where because i wouldn't i wouldn't i wouldn't do this solo i agree i agree i'm not gonna go on a saturday and be like it's weird tell your wife hey i'm gonna go hang out for eight hours and learn barbecue mastery i'd be like why don't you just barbecue for us you know but if i said hey i'm gonna take the kids and we're gonna go how to pick lock you learn how to pick locks We're going to learn how to start a car without a key. Now I'm just going after the ones that are really disastrous situations.

40:49Mozart didn't have to ask people how to write concertos. There's a little bit of like, if you're the type of person that needs this man school, you're maybe not going for it. No, again, this is the kind of stuff that my dad taught me how to tie knots and whittle and start a fire and stuff like that. But there's also other stuff on that list. city man school is just hanging out with your dad maybe yeah like there's a little bit of like what you've just described is like maybe it's not it's not it's our own thing maybe it's just like actively being a part of your family recreating life this is like with pmf or die we're recreating life right we're recreating locking in we're productizing locking in yeah there is this relentless pursuit of productization here where it's like do you need a course for this or can you just go do it.

41:35Like a lot of these things, it's like, go watch a YouTube video, buy a book on it, and you'll just know how to do it or just practice and learn from first principles. Like you can just barbecue and the first steak you make will be burnt. And then the fourth one will be delicious. Like it's not, it's not that insane. Um, yeah. Anyway, let's go to Jordan Schneider. He says real talk and he's quoting Rune. He says the thing about America is that it's clearly always functioning at like 10 % of its power level due to the costs of freedom and yet manages to win anyway due to the incredible benefits of freedom.

42:08Counter example is like China, which can reorient the entire ocean liner of its economy in a new direction if they want to go to war against COVID or whatever and yet manage to fuck it up. It's old, this is a throwback post. Good resurface from January 16, 2023. Yeah, I think, so I think there's an entire, an opportunity for a poster to get hundreds of thousands of followers and their entire job is just resurfacing. Old bangers. Yeah. Because right now the algorithm actually much prefers a screenshot like that than a quote tweet. Totally. And so your job is to be the archivist of X. Yeah. Just go back, find Steinman bangers from 2017.

42:51Yep. When he's, or, you know, 2017, he's in the trenches in Washington. Trenches, yeah. Saying the same stuff that he's saying now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go find, you know, Rune's like first true banger. Yeah, yeah, resurface it. Yeah. So resurface that. Curator. Yeah. Curator. It's good. But yeah, you could easily get a hundred thousand followers during that. But I like the core point there because you see, like, it is very easy to like lean into authoritarianism because you're just like, wow, things are so dysfunctional over here right now. Like, wouldn't it be amazing if like the government could just come in and like build high speed rail in like two seconds?

43:24And it's like, that would be good, but what would it cost? Like the cost would be freedom potentially. and it's often just like this hidden cost that just like sit there in the background. You don't really take it for granted. It's easy to take it for granted. So good post. We should go to a promoted post. Okay, so I'm jumping into a promoted post. I don't have it printed out today, but it is a cool one. So we recently acquired an iconic four-letter domain from our domain broker, Rob Schutz. No, Rob. Shut up, Rob. Rob, cool background. He was one of the founders of Roman and also Bark. Bark? Bark?

44:14Bark, yeah. Bark. Let me confirm. Yeah, just Bark Company. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know if it's a founder, but he's a founder. Yeah, so anyways, started some really big companies and just got obsessed with domains. And so as he phased out from Rowe, he decided to launch Snagged. It's at snagged on X or snagged.com. And he was able to help us get this amazing for a letter.com. I sent him the domain that we wanted at like 6 a.m. He had secured it by and done an entire deal to secure it at a ridiculously low price by, I think, like 9 a.m. It was like the fastest turnaround. So he's amazing. but I wanted to I wanted to highlight so back in 90 this is a post from from the snag account it says back in 94 the internet was a total free for all you could grab almost any domain and in many cases domain registrations were free at the time Chris Clark was a 29 year old consultant in Maryland Maryland on a whim he registered pizza.com why he thought maybe just maybe some pizza business would bite on his domain but nobody did.

45:24So he slapped some ads on it, made a little cash and left it to collect digital dust for 14 years. Fast forward to 2008, Chris heard that Vodka.com sold for 3 million so he listed his domain with a starting bid of 100 bucks. The next morning it was at half a million and by the end of the auction it hit 2.6 million. The buyer, a shady company which ended up getting busted for money laundering. They couldn't handle their dough. Rob's a great writer. Wow, what a great story. Even though pizza pizza.com is still out there it's stuck in the early 2000s with his sites and aesthetics and info no major pizza chain has ever bought it chris's one regret not registering more domains back in the day opportunity knocks but patience that's how you win so what's the next pizza.com only time will tell so that's so insane imagine being 94 you're just like registering and people were doing this a little bit with eth addresses right and solana addresses and i i knew i knew somebody who had like youtube.soul or something like that and it's like i just don't see google like actually buying that yeah um but uh there's some great ones out there if you can't see the future can't speak highly enough but i love that because uh you think about domain brokerage and it's like a pretty boring behind the scenes job but amazing content marketing that sounds like a great account to follow just to get interesting tidbits of internet history and i just love that so much so shout out to him and if you're looking for a domain hit him up and tell the tell him the technology brother sent you uh let's move on to a bucket poll jordy we got one from ben he says yes professor due to my brain rot diagnosis i need to have subway surfers playing during every lecture somehow just got no likes when we printed it out i don't know wait so ben so ben this this This is the guy who I just said he was posting bangers all morning.

47:18I was like, we need to hire this guy. I love this guy. This is fantastic. Very funny. The subway surfers is such a meme. I wonder how much the subway surfer trend is real or if like the Gen Z kids are like in on it. Do you think that they're like aware of like the brain rot and it's like they're laughing with it? Or do you think there are some people that are actually like this is more engaging? Yeah. What do you think? i whenever i pull them up i just look at it i'm like i'm so annoyed that this this yeah this other video is playing yeah but but it's partially because i was born like i i'm five days too old to be gen z sure or something like that so it's like i just think i'm not it's just a different generation yeah yeah the other interesting thing is like if you look at like espn or cnbc like those have brain rot elements where there will be tickers at the bottom picture in picture you go to bloomberg and it's like someone's talking while they're giving you the news facts on the side like yeah this idea of having a feed of content that's that's sending you multiple pieces of information all at once like it's definitely a thing yeah um okay we got a yeah we do that on our we do that on our videos people don't realize but there's a lot of alpha in the ticker the ticker on whenever we post videos on x yep tbspn uh let's go to trey stevens he says the offer is still on the table Jason.

48:39We had over a quarter million raised for charity within just a couple hours. Maybe don't chicken out this time. At Scientist, at Palmer Luckey. And so this was a clip from the All In podcast where Jason Calacanis and Dave Friedberg were discussing J. Cal getting in the ring with Palmer Luckey and Trey, who loves fighting sports, was offering to get in the ring. A lot of people were talking about this. This was during COVID when this first broke. Yeah, it's interesting that jason jason loves attention more than anyone that's that's very clear he has leveraged it in a you know and mostly you know he's built an accelerator he's got his fund he's got all this stuff he's definitely played his game well he understands that like attention is attention whether it's positive yeah but he typically you know he he is a bully yep and it's interesting that as soon as soon as the bully is actually getting invited saying step into the ring yep he's saying oh i you know it's i don't want to do his excuse was that he that palmer was like much younger or something like that i thought it was that trey was like the mountain he said or something like that yeah but but jason could just get off of zempick yeah and just get huge yeah he's got he can train he can hire zucks mma coach only thing i think he said that trey was younger than him oh yeah yeah yeah i mean trey and palmer are both younger than jason yeah but But, I mean, didn't stop Mike Tyson from stepping into the ring.

50:08He's a 60-year-old man. Yeah. Let's see it. I mean, I don't like the excuse. It's a duck. In UFC, it's called ducking. And John Jones has been doing this with the champion out of the UK where he just is making up all these excuses saying, well, I need$50 million if I want to fight him. Or, ah, it just doesn't make sense. That fight doesn't make sense for me right now. and jason would clearly just rather keep antagonizing yeah you know on the timeline i mean i don't know for at this point i'm i've been like fooled too many i've gotten my uh my like excitement levels up too many times with the zuck elon fight why hasn't there been a high profile the highest profile one is literally nick carter and that was like pretty tiny but that was very crypto yeah i don't even think well he was going to fight the bankless guys right but then the bankless guy uh got an injury and posted a photo of like he slipped a disc or something and so he was like i'm sorry i just can't fight you because i'm like injured and there was a big guy there was another big um awesome in crypto got got in a bit boy crypto guy they were fighting there's there's actually fight yeah there's shots of um bit boy getting an ass like an asthma didn't sam hyde fight someone too look the youtubers are really good at this like the content no and bryce what's the guy bryce hall bryce hall has gone into bare knuckle boxing and performed really he has done well and bare knuckles gnarly because if you make a mistake or you get clipped like your entire lip will get cut out like luke rockhold the the former ufc middleweight went in and was fighting um god what's it mike perry yeah and uh luke just gave up midway because he was his face was getting and this is a former ufc champion his face was getting so damaged he just was like i'm not going to do this and bryce hall goes in and does that yeah does well the fight club stuff's tough because like it's really hard to balance out all the different factors like even the zuck elon fight it's like i think elon has like five inches of height on zuck something like that and and so yeah size matters size really does matter but then zuck's been training for a lot longer so it depends on like if the fight was today maybe zuck's technique would work but if you give him a year technique so the thing about get up to speed so it really was like 50 50 for me you take two amateurs yeah and size is going to almost always do it unless it's mma where you can get a knockout yeah and and so or training for jiu-jitsu jiu-jitsu is cool yep because smaller dudes can just destroy like size matters less like i would have like all my i would have like a bunch of uh buddies around malibu over to do jiu-jitsu rob from from huberman would come and some other um dad friends and it's just funny you have like a former like old miss linebacker yeah just getting fighting like a college like basketball player and they're like super even even though like they in a true street fight like it probably wouldn't isn't there i saw someone on x talking about uh doing some sort of like founder fight club they wanted us to fight and so i was uh chris yeah i thought that was kind of funny um let's go to atlas creatine cycle he says many of you used to be technology accounts is he just reflecting on like the shift to politics yeah i felt like this was a a sub sub tweeted sub tweeted me but it was actually just everybody but it was uh as uh you know the fires i think catalyzed a bunch of people to say i'm gonna stop posting about peck for a few days and just focus on uh mayor mayor karen and the newsom fires and you stack all that on top of what happened to your speaker in your car and you must have just been rocked so it makes sense that you were you know, just broke, broke character couldn't talk about tech anymore I'm happy to be back talking about tech we got a city to rebuild and we can get back into tech because there's still really interesting stuff going on but when big political things happen you've got to address them because tech is increasingly political because the stakes are so high, the businesses are so large and Elon is at Mar-a-Lago hanging out with Trump and so clearly technology and politics are going to continue to intertwine for a long time.

54:40But yeah, you can't ever slip fully into politics. It's just boring. Should we do another promoted post? Let's see here. We got some Locky Groom or you want to move on? I actually got a promoted post from our Sean and Connor and Sean sent this over. Connor and Sean over at the Ridge Wallet. they say 500 free-ish Ridge Wallets up for grabs. We donated$50 ,000 to LA Fire Relief this week and are trying to find more ways to contribute. Wallets, unfortunately, are non-essential items, so donating product doesn't make a lot of sense, but money goes a long way. So here's what we're trying. If you submit proof of a$50-plus donation to any LA Fire Relief organization, we'll send you a Ridge Wallet for free.

55:28We'll do this for the first 500 people who submit it's the cheapest you'll ever get a ridge wallet and you'll be doing good details below for how to submit so uh very cool uh if you wanted to get a ridge wallet um now is the time to do it if it's not too late already i don't think it is that's great um so thank you to sean and connor for uh helping raise money for fire relief uh here in southern california cool let's go to some dms that we don't have printed out, but I have here on my phone. Michael Tostod says, the Tech Bros pod should have, quote, is this secret communist section really bring back the McCarthyism?

56:07And you said, ha ha, that's great. Looking forward to the segment. We've been too deep digging into secret communism. So I think we should have, I think we have a new segment. It can be kind of sporadic. Yeah. Where we sort of try to figure out. Who are the targets? Like the venture communists? Well, so Karen Bass was the target. it turns out her political career I guess this was just the beginning of her political career she was a very active communist working directly with the Cuban government in the 70s so yeah I just think I talked about this before people have been looking for new slurs communists there's been a fixation on slurs and so venture capitalists hey, John, that market map makes you look like a junior VC.

56:59There you go. Slurs like that. Communist, mouth breather, low T, low magnesium levels. There's plenty. So there's plenty. Let's go to the next comment that someone said. It was a photo of us, and they say, no cases on their phone? Yeah, these guys have exits. That's great. And then Nate chimes in with the Jordy Hayes stack. No phone case, no socks, no shampoo. Harrison Maxwell, where Ethan is? This is in the reply to Ben's post. So Ben's, producer Ben. His account's been exploding. His account has been. Get in now. He's a couple hundred followers. He's blowing up. It's great. That's great. Here's a good question for us.

57:45Britton Winterose says, tasked with hosting an event VCs will want to attend, The options are Porsche racing experience, skiing, a panel of three other VCs, or other comment below. And Mario says Tech Bros Pod should have good insight. Jordy, what do you think? You want to attract as many VCs to the event you're throwing? What do you go for? Honestly, the last time I saw True Flock was the Gundo. Oh, we remember that last year. Like a flock of VCs. says a flock of vcs yeah because it was just we need a name for that you know how like if you get a group of lions it's called pride of lions or you get a bunch of crows for a order of crows i think a flock is good because you have flock of sheep like see some of them are seagulls like the rats you know the rats of the air some are pigeons yeah also kind of you know they're they're foraging they're just trying to nip off like just all i need is half a percent that's my ownership target get it you know they're just trying to get a crumb the others are the you know more of like the the eagles you know like the the um the ones that sit high above and and i'd put that's not what you call eagles though no i know but i'm just saying we're gonna broadly we're gonna we're gonna uh flock of birds i think is is fair uh so we got to kind of bucket in a few different a group of eagles is called a convocation of convocation that's good the convocation of an army or a congress but do you remember that when when the gundo i think you catalyzed it in some way with your documentary it was already building yep and then every every vc was was like yeah i'm gonna let me know if you're around i'm gonna be in the gundo this week you know um and uh it's cool i mean so you would say if you want to host an event with vcs just go like the hottest new sub market that's blowing up yeah like a high influencer and then just take them on a tour of startups in the area yeah that's probably good that works i would say big game hunting would also be good yeah the number of gps that are secretly taking multiple trips a year to hunt elephants yeah elks lions really exotic mostly predators but predator hunting yeah hunting's really big right now um yeah also porsche racing experience that's fine but you'd be better off doing the dakar yeah putting a group together driving from yeah they go all three thousand yeah the gumball was also good uh great great um great option um let's see what else oh my god someone just did guess the podcast and it's just photos of us i think like this that's hilarious when is that today oh yeah i guess i just posted this i like this that's great oh that's bad and you posted that took some just took some photos the prada slides that's great uh ben's out of control ben in following ben right now is like buying bitcoin oops following ben right now is like buying bitcoin in in 1981 just gets older every single time we promote something let's go to a bucket poll uh we got juicy saying dudes be having the worst day of their life and still keep sending memes to their homies like nothing happened 100k likes i completely agree with this even during the fires you lost cell service but i was still sending you memes and i was like uh he hasn't replied like by like hours like this is bad this is like very uncouth but yeah this is the way like men no i think people i think yeah i think um i was i was kind of processing this i was thinking about this last week because i was sort of oscillating between being extremely angry at the response of our leaders in california and then also needing to kind of process it through humor yeah of course and so yeah i mean i can i can remember that the svb the period when when svb was collapsing it was very impactful on our on our business but then i also had a family health emergency at like 2 a.m that thursday and thursday and friday was like the last money you could get money or the last day you could get money out so but i still remember everybody was just like memeing it like internally like it was like the biggest the most existential crazy existential moment for silicon valley where we were like did we did did this startup economy just get nuked yeah and then everybody was you know the group chats were having a moment you know of course of course as they do never stops um let's go to mark andreason he says well this is really going to cramp my style and he shows a screenshot a message block the semantic email security dot cloud service has detected content in an email that matches the following policy inappropriate content five dot x dot x please remove any language inappropriate for business and resend the message the funny thing is like this is clearly like on a16z's network right i imagine or maybe maybe it's very different it could be out like but it's just funny that he's like triggering the uh the content flags he's mouthing off so much i love it true technology your brother behavior yeah we're bringing we're we're trying to encourage people to bring back intensity to the workplace yes and part of that is saying not words like the r word yeah it's saying like the f-bomb yeah you know yeah uh all caps we get it fucking done you know the thing about ron conway how every email he sends is all caps really yeah incredible it's just like everything you open is just screaming basically i don't know that's great but you gotta turn you gotta turn the volume down before you open an email from from ron conway yeah yeah yeah for sure for sure uh let's go to andrea she says much respect to us who have one twitter account where we should post conduct business and socialize from sigma moves and i agree with this there's the class is a question of like oh i got some spicy takes should i set up at a non-account and i don't know i think that yeah you just got to find the correct line and only post things that you're comfortable living on forever and being baked into the the the god in a box feeding the ice all right the llm yeah so the ai yeah that's that's part of it we're gonna every one of us is training these models through the stuff that we're putting online yep and so if you want the model to be more politically incorrect be more politically incorrect right yeah and do it on main yeah it's no you I bet you XAI really tries.

1:04:32I bet they're really good at detecting bots for XAI. Oh, yeah, for sure. They don't want any of that slop that says, check out my bio now. Some of that stuff. Or even just like, ChatGPT just destroyed Grok and Anthropic, like 10 amazing discoveries below, like the stupid threads, like all those need to get filtered out. there is something to be said about like that mixed use account that's really cool like nikita broke it down where he was like look like you're not going to have like some deep insight or some you know revolutionary deep dive every single day so you should just be kind of like hanging out at the water cooler telling jokes effectively shit posting yeah do that uh like just whenever something comes to you a couple times a day and then but then you need to mix in a serious post like once a week or something so that yeah and andrea is like joking around but she does some of the best analysis exactly on the consumer package goods industry and it's the most entertaining so i think it's it's definitely and when you share stuff that is personal like your personal interests like for me i'm always surprised if i share anything ufc related i get a bunch of people that i that i'm friends with that i didn't even know like the sport and they'll and we talk about it whatever i mean that's the beauty of x is that it's not designed like siloed reddits so yeah you don't need to like go and take your account over to watch twitter or tech twitter or media twitter ufc twitter to engage with those people you can just kind of like follow a few people engage post and the algorithm will send sometimes it sends posts off to a different region of x and you're like oh okay there's a whole different community here and they love me or they hate me who knows maybe i gotta lock my account the canadian yeah The Alaskans got me good.