Over the years, Sonos has weathered competition from better known rivals like Apple and Bose to find a devoted audience among audio enthusiasts. But lately its wireless speaker has lost ground to an unexpected competitor, Amazon’s Echo. Now it faces another challenge: a change in the corner office. After 14 years leading the company he helped found, John MacFarlane has resigned as chief executive of Sonos and has been replaced by one of his deputies, Patrick Spence.
Mr. MacFarlane, 50, has also left the company’s board of directors, though he will remain an employee to help mentor colleagues and work on other projects. He said he left the board so Mr. Spence would not feel like he was always looking over his shoulder.
“I don’t want to be that founder who’s always second-guessing,” Mr. MacFarlane said.
Sonos is a rarity among technology companies, started in 2002 at a time when independent hardware companies in consumer electronics, an industry dominated by much bigger players, were hard to find. Mr. MacFarlane did not take venture capital money for several years and kept the company private, shunning the usual routine of selling shares to the public or being acquired by a bigger company.
Based hundreds of miles away from the glare of Silicon Valley in the seaside town of Santa Barbara, Calif. — does not have the visibility of an Apple, Facebook or Uber. But it has amassed a loyal following with its family of wireless speakers, which allow people to play music streamed from internet services like Spotify or stored on a local computer.
One of the secrets to Sonos’s business is that once listeners become hooked on the sound from one of the company’s speakers, they tend to buy more of them so they can simultaneously play music in multiple rooms in their homes.
Sonos would not disclose its sales, but it said there are millions of homes with its speakers in them, many of them with more than one speaker. Mr. MacFarlane previously said that the company’s 2015 sales were around $1 billion. Mr. Spence, who was previously president and chief commercial officer at Sonos, said the company is profitable.
