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John MacFarlane earned electrical engineering degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and, in 1990, UC Santa Barbara. In the 1990s he built an enterprise messaging business, Software.com, with longtime collaborator Craig Shelburne, sold its systems to customers such as AT&T, and merged it with Phone.com to form Openwave in Redwood City, which failed after the dot-com crash. Wealth from Software.com let him self-fund his next venture. In August 2002 MacFarlane, Shelburne, Tom Cullen and Trung Mai founded Rincon Audio in Santa Barbara, renamed Sonos in May 2004, to stream synchronized music to multiple rooms at a time when home Wi-Fi was unreliable. Their answer was SonosNet, a proprietary encrypted peer-to-peer mesh network in which each speaker relays the signal to the next.

At a 2004 conference in Carlsbad, California, Steve Jobs told MacFarlane the scroll wheel on his prototype controller might violate Apple’s iPod patents. Sonos aimed to ship the ZP100 ZonePlayer and CR100 controller for the 2004 holidays but missed the date, shipping between January and March 2005 rather than release unfinished hardware. In April 2005 it added the Rhapsody subscription service, later followed by SiriusXM, Spotify, QQ Music, Amazon Music and Apple Music. In March 2016 MacFarlane shifted Sonos away from local music files toward streaming and voice control, with layoffs, as the Amazon Echo upended the industry. In January 2017 he announced he was stepping down as CEO and leaving the board, handing the job to president Patrick Spence.

• SonosNet used AES encryption so that only Sonos speakers could talk to each other, protecting the network from interference.
• The ZP100 and CR100 system won Best of Audio at the 2005 CES Innovations Awards.
• Sonos took no outside funding at its founding, giving the founders control over their own engineering timeline.
• MacFarlane wrote that he had delayed his planned exit to steer Sonos through the Amazon Echo pivot.
• He said he was leaving because his wife was battling breast cancer, and that he would focus on science and math education and selective advisory roles.