Bose CEO谈转型：从产品公司到音频技术授权商

Today, I’m talking with Lila Snyder, who is the CEO of Bose.

You certainly know Bose — it’s one of the most famous brands in all of consumer tech. The company started 60 years ago selling speakers to consumers, and its focus on research and development has led it to be a leader in both car audio and noise-canceling headphones.

Lila was last on the show about four years ago, and since then she’s dramatically rearchitected the company. The focus on research is still there, but she’s sold off Bose Professional, acquired the high-end audio brands McIntosh Labs and Sonus faber, and, perhaps most importantly, started licensing all that core Bose technology to other companies.

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That means that while you can still go buy a Bose soundbar or Bose headphones, the company is also turning into a B2B business, and you can get Bose technology in Skullcandy headphones and Epson projectors, among many other products.

That big change in the business comes with a big change in structure. Becoming a software company in addition to a product company comes with a whole new set of challenges, and Lila and I talked about how it’s all working out.

I also wanted to know if this is all a reaction to the potential rise of AI wearables — products that might end up looking a lot like headphones, and which need all kinds of audio processing to enable voice input.

Is Bose just trying to sell tech to a range of new companies that might disrupt headphones entirely? Or does Lila have a plan for a headphones market that was already disrupted when phone vendors like Apple and Samsung made their own products like AirPods and Galaxy Buds work better than the competition?

We got deep on this, and Lila was pretty open about the challenges and the opportunities here. As Decoder listeners know, I’m a huge audio nerd, so I loved every minute of this conversation. I hope you do too.

Okay: Bose CEO Lila Snyder. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Lila Snyder, you’re CEO of Bose. Welcome back to Decoder.

Thank you so much.

I am really excited to talk to you. It’s been four years since you were last on the show, which seems entirely too long.

A lot of things have happened. Bose has bought some companies. You’ve sold some divisions. The idea of what headphones are is largely the same in one important way, but maybe going to be very different in another important way. How are you thinking about Bose today?

We are having a lot of fun in what I would describe as our second chapter of the transformation of Bose since I joined. In some ways, many things are the same. We’re still making amazing products for our customers. We’re still excited about bringing that new technology forward in both our consumer business and our automotive business. But I would say two things fundamentally have changed as we’ve thought about growth for Bose for the future.

For 60 years, it was all Bose, and we’re now a multi-brand company. So as you said, we’ve made a couple of acquisitions. One of those was the McIntosh brand, a legendary 75-year-old audiophile brand that we absolutely love, and also Sonus faber, which is an Italian craftsmanship heritage brand that’s also been around for over 40 years. And so that brought us two things: from one brand to multiple brands, but also into the luxury audio space.

The second change for us is that we’ve always been an amazing products company where we developed technology through research and a lot of development cycles, and all of that technology went into Bose products. And today what’s different is we’re still doing that, and we’ve added a technology business we call Audio Tech, where we’re taking that technology and starting to put it into other places.

The big insight for us was that sound is really important. It’s getting more important, we think, given everything that’s going on in the world around us. There are so many products and devices out there that are using sound — whether that’s audio, voice, or even noise-canceling, where those things are incredibly relevant — but they’re not products that Bose would make. They’re not targeted at our customer set. But we really have a strong belief in bringing great audio to as many places as we can.

The last time we talked, you were in the middle of becoming a more functional company. In particular, you had said the last step was the engineering organization, which is really the heart of Bose. It had been very divisional, very organized into products. You were centralizing that.

Having an audio tech division that sells core technology feels like a very natural offshoot of that. “We’re going to have a big central engineering team. It’s going to feed into our products and other products,” and then you can abstract that a little bit and sell it to other people. Who are the customers for the audio tech division?

So it’s a B2B2C business, if you will. So our customers are large companies that are putting products into the market. So I’ll give you a couple of examples. We’ve partnered with Motorola on a series of products from earbuds to making the phone itself sound better.

So Motorola is a good example. We’re partnered with Xreal. They’re making pretty awesome XR glasses, right? So that’s an experience where sound really matters a lot. We’ve had a lot of fun partnering with them. You’re starting to see Bose technology show up in a lot of different verticals, from mobile to compute, to other people’s headphones and audio products for sure.

We just released, with a partner called Sena, a motorcycle helmet communications device. And we’re excited about all the places we’re bringing our technology. It’s actually creating a broader aperture for how we think about invention and research at Bose as well, which is really exciting.

I want to come to that because that seems like a big change. And the reason I asked about customers is that having a new set of customers really changes the focus of the company. A lot of us are familiar with audio brands in particular partnering with device makers, partnering with automakers.

Yeah.

Maybe it’s just a logo. I think you have been very proud that Bose has not been just a logo in many places, but for a lot of people it’s just a logo. What’s the difference between, okay, there’s Xreal glasses powered by Bose with a Bose logo on the side, and selling the technology without the Bose logo? Or does a Bose logo always come with it?

When you said this is new for Bose, in a way, yes, but in a way it’s exactly what we’ve been doing in automotive for over 40 years. And so we do have a model for doing this inside the company, and it’s just broadening that thinking into new spaces. First and foremost, we’re selling technology, and the technology is the key. And then in some cases, we’re also selling the brand. So you might get technology in a product without a Sound by Bose or Powered by Bose logo on it, or you might get the logo as well, but you’ll never get the logo without the tech, if that makes sense.

Some of our partners are interested in the brand, some are not. Sometimes we’re interested in having our brand connected to their brand, and sometimes we’re not. And so that’s part of the discussion we have with each of our customers, about whether it makes sense for them and for us. And so when you see it, know that it’s been really thoughtful, but it’s also attached to a lot of great technology that’s inside that product.

Tell me about those conversations. Is it cheaper to take the brand? Is it more expensive to take the brand? This is one of those places where Bose has maybe a bigger, more famous brand than maybe some of the customers. How are you thinking about that, and how does the cost change?