New Sonos CEO Tom Conrad once helped kickstart a Sonos competitor

Looking to turn the corner after a rough year, Sonos swapped out its leadership this week: Patrick Spence, who took the company public in 2018, has been replaced by longtime board member Tom Conrad, who previously held product and tech leadership roles at Pandora, Snap and Quibi. Conrad is serving as a temporary CEO for the time being while the company settles on a permanent replacement for Spence.

The move comes as Sonos is still struggling to recover from a botched app relaunch tied to the introduction of its first pair of headphones. In an email to staff, Conrad did indeed say a lot of the right things, and his tech and product background could help Sonos get back on track. Plus, Conrad does have a long history with audio hardware – to the point where he almost helped launch some major competition to Sonos a little over a decade ago.

Back in 2014, Conrad was serving as Pandora’s CTO, and in that role, he was fielding countless inbound requests from would-be Sonos competitors looking to integrate with the music service. At the time, Sonos was still forcing almost every music service to exclusively go through its app – even Spotify wasn’t able to directly integrate with Sonos until late 2016 – and a bunch of the speaker maker’s would-be competitors wanted to go down the same route. Others were open to integrating with Pandora’s app, but each of them had their own API, complicating things for the music service.