Sonos Finally Fires Its CEO

Sonos quietly parted ways with Patrick Spence over the weekend and is now searching for a new CEO to lead the embattled company. Spence was the architect of last year’s flawed plan to dramatically expand the Sonos product lineup beyond smart speakers. But this shift triggered the Sonosgate fiasco in which the company replaced its mobile app with an almost unusable new version so it could get a pair of headphones into the market.

Sonos has yet to publicly announce the change, and its website still describes Spence as the CEO as I write this. But the company reached out to the press to explain the overdue change. And it has explicitly confirmed that Spence’s departure is tied to the mobile app issues.

“We’re turning a page on the chapter that we’re in and forging a path ahead that gets us in the direction that we want to be going for ourselves and our customers,” a Sonos statement awkwardly notes in a reflection of this sudden change.

Sonos board member Thomas Conrad, previously of Pandora Media, Snap, and Quibi, has stepped into an interim CEO role while the company searches for a permanent leader.

“When it doesn’t work, our customers are taken out of the moment and are right‬ to feel that we’ve let them down,” Mr. Conrad told employees via email. “I think we’ll all agree that this year we’ve let far too many‬ people down.”

Don’t shed any tears for Mr. Spence. He’s receiving a $1.9 million severance package from Sonos and will earn a further $7500 a month as an advisor to the Sonos board of directors through June. At that time, his Sonos shares will fully vest, giving him untold millions more.

Sonos will announce its next quarterly financial results in February. But perhaps this is a good time for Apple to consider an acquisition.