Welcome to Strictly Business Variety's weekly podcast featuring conversations with industry leaders about the business of media and entertainment. I'm Shirley Halbrin, Executive editor of Music, and today I'm joined by Lilah Snyder, CEO of Bowes Corporation, the consumer audio company which is soon to mark its sixtieth anniversary. Founded by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Mr. Bows its home has always been Massachusetts, with close proximity to Boston and
its abundance of student talent. Lilah was one of them, earning a master's degree and PhD in mechanical engineering from MIT following her bachelor's in mechanical engineering from the University of Miami. She arrived at Bo's at the top of twenty twenty, just as the COVID nineteen pandemic through the
world and supply chains into a tales. But Llila is an expert problem solver, and like any engineering challenge, she approached her new job overseeing all aspects of the company's consumer, electronics, automotive and related businesses methodically and also with a guiding principle that sound is not an accessory, it is everything we do. It is the most important thing, and it's
in the center. Bosea's rise in becoming a top name and sound, particularly when it comes to the car, saw an inflection point in the nineteen eighties when the company teamed with Cadillac to offer a premium car audio system. Llila's own origin story also has an eighties connection. It was then that she first discovered a love of music,
which she's carried through to her chief executive position. Like in other tech industries where female engineers are far outnumbered by their male counterparts, Lila is hoping to better the statistic when it comes to music makers through an initiative called Turn the Dial, which aims to address why fewer than three percent of hit song producers are women or non binary. It's also bringing awareness to the issue and
seeking new opportunities. They've partnered with a nonprofit called She Is the Music and are working with such artists as Her and Pink Panthers and behind the scenes stars like Wonder Girl and Blondish to tell their stories. And then there's the part of the Bo's business that has to do with silence or noise cancelation. Bose has been hard at work coming up with the perfect software algorithm to evaluate the sounds around you and cancel out what you
don't want to hear. As Lila describes it, it's almost tuning the dial on the volume of your life. Which things you want to turn up, which things you want to turn down. This constant push of new innovation has become Bose's calling card, and Lilah Snyder is leading the choir. Join us after the break, Welcome back to strictly business. Here's my conversation with Bo's Corporation CEO Lilah Snyder. Lilah Snyder,
chief executive officer of Bo's, Welcome to strictly business. Thanks for being with us.
Thank you so much for having me so Lyla.
I think it's really funny that your previous position before you got to Bo's was a Pitney Bows. So you went from Pitney Bow's to Bo's just getting shorter. A lot of people probably don't know what Pitney bos is, but me, being a person of print of paper, I know that it is kind of an essential of starting a business, which is the ability to mail, to reach consumers directly, and you know many other things. So how do you go from mail and marketing and communications to
high end audio and consumer audio? Why did you make that change in twenty twenty.
So I'm an engineer at heart, and what I really love is technology, and the thread that goes through everything is technology, and particularly this idea of you know, how do we use technology to make things better? And we've been living in this amazing two decades where digital technologies are just changing every business and software is changing every business, and in some ways that's the thread between a shipping and mailing company and then coming to bows and consumer
audio is you know, how do we use software? How do we use digital technology to make what we're delivering to customers even better? And so for me, I've done consumer work, I've done business to business work, and I've always loved the idea of getting close to the consumer because when you know who you're talking to and you know what they care about, it makes it really fun to try to design and develop amazing experiences for them, and that's what we try to do at Bo's. It's really a lot of fun.
So you have the software element and also hardware. As someone who's trained as a mechanical engineer, is it sort of like a left brain right brain thing, like the hardware is one thing, the software is something else. Do you feel a pull towards one side over the other or is it just sort of combined in your head?
You know, it really is combined. I don't actually think of them as that different, because ultimately we work backwards from the experience we're providing the customer, and the experience that we're providing is sort of a fully integrated experience where it's the magic of how the hardware and the software work together. It's that sort of systems engineering component that I think is really unique for consumer electronics companies
and bows in general. It's how you marry great software with really well made, really well architected hardware, and it's the two together that create the magic. So we try not to separate them.
Interesting, I would think that they were like two different skill sets.
There's no doubt there's different skill sets, right. So if you think about our team, we've got lots of folks who do predominantly hardware and lots who do predominantly software. But really bringing it together is the key, and that's where I think I have a lot of fun and working with the team on how you bring those things together is where you know truly new and different innovative experiences happen for customers.
So when you came in in twenty twenty, what kind of staff were you overseeing.
So we're a team of about six thousand globally. I obviously joined in the middle of COVID, so in twenty twenty, we we're a global team. We've got folks all over the world, and we were doing everything over Zoom, which was an interesting way to start. I think in many ways a lot of us felt like it leveled the playing field, right. We were all on the screen and so you could have more of a global, diverse group of people together working on problems, which was really actually quite fun.
Has that made you rethink the whole in person thing, like is it really necessary today?
So? I think it is for innovative and I think if you're really going to try to create breakthrough ideas, it's hard to do that remotely. I don't think every piece of work needs to be done in person, and we certainly each of us has a lot of work that's better done in a quiet space, which is often you know, your own home or your living room or whatever.
But we really believe in the magic of bringing people together to innovate and create and also just to build bonds and trust and you know, human things that are a little bit harder to do in a remote environment. So you know, we've settled into a hybrid model I think like a lot of companies have, where we're getting folks together on a regular basis, they're in the office a couple of times a week, but providing a lot of flexibility for people to also work the way that
they want to work and that works for them. So we're trying to strike the right balance and I'm sure, like most we're still feeling our way through it. But it's great to see folks together again, and we're feeling that energy and creativity in the work that we're doing.
And you guys were also dealing, like the rest of the world was, with supply chain issues during COVID, and you you really rely on the supply chain to make your product. So when you got to BOS, did you have immediate things that you needed to deal with.
I think when you're new, you always think about what's the right strategy, right. You want to kind of get the lay of the land and set your agenda. And so I spent a fair bit of time listening and learning right. Companies are complicated places with a lot of history, and so before you change things, it's important to understand why things are done the way that they are and why decisions were made and why the strategy is what
it is. And then we started to really plot for the future of both what's our long range vision and we spent a lot of time thinking about, you know, what matters to us, what matters to our customers. We put our customer right in the center of that vision, and that led us to some pretty exciting places around who we are and how we want to bring our
brand and our products and experiences into the market. And so that sort of initial period was a lot of fun and just exploring, you know, how we want to evolve as a company and who we are and how we take that to the next level.
What were those challenges during those first couple of years.
I think it's always a challenge to think about really defining who your customer is and understanding so we spend a lot of time on that. And as you see the Bose brand showing up in the market and you think about our products, we've really embraced music and the music lover We think that people who really love music, they have a passion, they identify with certain genres. It's part of their identity, part of their personal brand, if you will, and that's who we really think the Bose
customer has always been. Right. We've been creating audio experiences for almost sixty years, which is amazing, and we think that you know, really embracing that music lover it kind of gave us a muse to innovate around and that's led to a lot of great forward looking innovation that we think is going to position us well for the future.
So, I mean your sort of like origin story as it were, Leila, is that you had dispose wave radio. It was sort of like a like a half circle looking thing and it had an alarm and all of that had a CD player. So what kind of music were you into? You know, they say that your most formative time to love music is in your early twenties, basically coming out of college. What was your thing?
I feel like my formative years were in the eighties, So I do have a love of eighties pop and a little bit of that metal rock that came from the eighties for sure. Okay, also love classic rock, right country music was a thing in my house, like old country music, and so that's something that I have an appreciation for and how that's evolved. But today I would say, you know, at my house, we've got three teenagers, my husband and I, and there is a diversity of music
in our household, which is pretty remarkable. Right when you cross over what your kids are interested in, you really get introduced to a lot of things. So on any given day, you might hear classical music, rap music. It's a lot of Taylor Swift that's happening. Yeah, there's there's definitely some of that here.
I love the story that you relayed in one of the talks that you gave about the arrival of premium audio, because music lovers really want that elevated audio experience. Like you know, when you and I grew up, we probably put headphones on. You know, we listened to the CD or the vinyl or the tape, and you know, got to really like immerse ourselves in it. Now people are
on the go. I think you've said this a bunch that music is sort of like the soundtrack to our lives, but it's very much as we're moving through our lives. So I wanted to ask you about the arrival of premium audio, especially in the car, because that is something that you guys have really doubled down on, not just recently,
but like going back decades. So can you tell us when did that change happen when you no longer had to take your car to like an audio specialist and get it souped up, you know, because everything came with it.
Yep, So it was in the early eighties. Was the first car was a Cadillac Seville and it was a collaboration between Cadillac and Bows. And the idea was simple. It was what do you do when you drive? You listen to music, and why shouldn't we try to create a great experience in your car. And I don't know anyone who retrofits their car anymore because the premium audio that comes in the car is usually just outstanding. And the car is such a great place. It's a controlled environment.
You know where the passengers are sitting, you know the dimensions of the car, and that gives you this really great creative space to put the technology in a design
that allows for these optimized experiences. And we've got such a talented team that sweats every one of those details when they're putting together a car with our automotive partners, to make sure that as the driver or as the front seat passenger or as a rear seat passenger, we're really thinking about the experience that each one of those
people in the car will have. And it makes me always want to buy a new car because I hear what we're doing in our labs and in our garage, and I listen in those and then I have a great Bose audio system in my current car, but I know what's coming next is just truly amazing, as immersive audio and three dimensional audio just starts to become much
more present in our lives. I think that there's a lot of that technology that's right on the cusp of enveloping us in great sound in our car, and I'm excited about what's coming there.
So another thing that I find really fascinating about your work. This is related both to headphones and quiet comfort earbud sort of system, which is noise cancelation. It's a very complex algorithm because on the one hand, you want to cancel everything out so you can go to sleep on the plane, whatever, But in a car and walking you also need to be aware of traffic and sirens and things like that. Can you sort of explain how that works.
Yeah, it's a great question, and you know, at Bo's we're really innovating in three areas and you've sort of touched on all of them in this question in a way. You know, one is obviously immersive, lifelike audio like the artist intended it at the end of the day, that's really what we're after. The second one is noise cancelation.
We use noise cancelation or noise removal as a way to create almost a clean palette, right that allows you to enjoy that audio without the distractions of the world around you, whether those are on a plane or on
a city street or on the subway. And then the last one, which is newer for us, and it's something that's really enabled by the ability to have more computing power in the devices and also you know, the developments in AI, we're able to do something that we call hear what you want, which is sort of this combination of exactly as you said. There are things that if I'm walking on a city street, I want to be able to hear, and there are other things that I don't.
I don't want to hear the jackhammer, but I want to hear the ambulance or the police car or the bus or whatever might be the dangerous thing that's happening nearby. And so we're using a lot of technology now to try to make that experience seamless, where you don't have to choose between noise canceling and transparency. But how do we help you seamlessly go through your day and allow the sounds in that we know you likely want, And so we're doing a lot of work on that. To me,
it's exciting to think about. It's almost tuning the dialog the volume of your life, which things you want to turn up, which things you want to turn down. You know, the example that I love. If you're at a noisy restaurant or a noisy bar, it can be really hard to hear the person that you're actually there with and there's a lot of shouting that happens and a lot
of leaning in. And to me, that's one great example of where this hearing what you want AI type technology where we can detect the voice that you want to hear, but sort of quiet the noise around you, not take it away. You still want the fun and the vibe of being in the space, but maybe just with the
volume turned down a little bit. So I think there are a lot of these use cases where we can take the decades of what we know about noise cancelation, combine it with this new technology that we're developing now to create these seamless, sort of customized almost experiences going forward.
So is our future sitting across each other with buds in our ears, then getting into a driver less car where the audio has been you know, the soundtrack is made for us, Like I mean, are we really like living in the future already?
I think aspects. You know, there are technology drives so many things, so many of the things that we use on a daily basis, and audio experiences are no different. Right. The speakers, the headphones your car deliver the sound. It's software and algorithms and AI that are creating those experiences, right. Noise cancelation is about the microphones and the way that the sound comes in and the geometry of your ear.
But it's also about the software algorithm that is very quickly in microseconds, evaluating the sounds and canceling them out. And so you have this constant push of new innovation, and as we're able to put chips into smaller and smaller spaces that can do more computing power, your ability to do more of the things that I just described increases.
And as it does, you know, we're excited to start putting the things we're developing in the lab into those whether it's your car, pair of headphones, pair of earbuds.
We need to take a quick break, but we'll be back with more from Lila Schnyder. And we're back with both CEO Lilah Snyder. Because problem solving is such a tenet of engineering, and that's what you studied. I'm curious where do your business chops come from?
If you think about what a CEO's job is. The first and most important job that I have is assembling an amazing team who are experts in different areas and are diverse in the way that they solve problems and think about things. And that alleviates my need to know a little bit about everything or a lot about anything right, and that I think is the most important thing. Right.
There's there's no decision that gets made where I don't lean on the people on my team, who generally know more than I do about any any topic and get their counsel, their advice, their thinking. And so that diversity of thought, I think is what's really necessary to run a modern company because it's a complicated world. There are so many things to think about and do, and no one person can do that. So assembling a great team is I think the most important piece of it.
Did you aspire to run a company?
I didn't know. I started as an engineer, as we've talked about, and I went into consulting, So I guess part of the answer to your last question is I learned about business as a consultant at McKinsey and had just an amazing opportunity to get a really diverse set of experiences, different companies, different problems, to solve different business challenges, which is a really great way to learn a lot
pretty quickly. And so that all developed through that experience at McKinsey, and it wasn't until I don't know a few years ago that I started thinking about being potentially being a CEO. I generally just enjoyed working on interesting, hard problems with people that I love to work with, and somehow that led me here and I'm having a great time doing it.
Of course, you know, men far out number female engineers, certainly in tech and absolutely in the making of music. Yep, there's been many studies in the last few years that have shown very little change in the representation of women as producers and engineers, as little as two point eight percent, and even new findings from Bose have shown that it's even lower. Two point three percent of top one hundred hits in twenty twenty two were produced by women. So
this is something that you're taking on. I would love for you to tell us about the turn the Dial initiative and what you think can be done here.
Yeah, I mean I found this stat to be particularly shocking. You know, we know in certain fields and certain industries that women are underrepresented, but this feels like a space in music production that just hasn't had much movement right
in the last several years. Whereas you know, I think in others we're talking about it more, right, this is one that at least I hadn't been hearing about as much as we might be hearing about in engineering or in technology or in the C suite right where you know, we see articles and things about those challenges all the time. This one felt like no one had really put a spotlight on it. And you know, we love music at Bo's, Right. I talked before that our customer is the music lover
and that's actually who we are too. Right, if you kind of show up at any Bo's facility around the world, there will be a conversation about music. There'll be someone with a guitar, or there'll be someone playing a riff at lunch, like, there will be something happening that has to do with music. And as people who love music, I think we believe that the more diverse the producers
of music are, the better the music will be. And so this was one that we thought we could maybe do something about and we wanted to lean into it.
Yeah, so what are you doing.
Well, it's a couple things. I mean, I think the first thing is just talking about it, right. It's been great to see the reaction. I've gotten so many positive comments about our getting involved in this, and it really is touching a chord with folks. So we partnered with a few great producers like Her and Pink Pantherest and Wonder Girl and Blondish to have them tell their stories.
There's nothing more powerful than hearing one of those, two point eight or two point three percent of women tell the story about how they got there and why they persevered in a space that clearly has been challenging for women in the past, and so part of it is just raising awareness and talking about I think there's value in that. We're also partnering with a nonprofit called She
Is the Music. They do a lot of terrific work in this area and they've been great at helping guide us on what more could we do to have an impact, and so with their help, we've created something we call the Sound Is Power Impact Board, and we've collected a bunch of great industry A and R folks alongside some of our music producers that we're partnering with, and they're really getting together to help us evaluate and shine a
light on new talent. And so we've been asking for submissions right so for female and non binary producers to upload their work, get their sounds and their beats into the hands of our impact Board, who are going to review them and try to help raise up some of these great folks who are working out there but are having trouble having their voice be heard. And so we're excited about that we're only a little over a month in.
We've got hundreds of submissions and our impact board will meet quarterly to review them, and we're really excited to see what's going to come out of that.
You mentioned before that your employees and your consumers share a passion for audio. They share that interest in music. Do you think that's an important business tenant to have that connection.
I do. I think it's one of the unique things about those You know, it's all we do right, and a lot of our competitors do amazing things, but they're doing a lot of different things. And I think what makes us unique is that we joke at Bo's sound is not an accessory. It is everything we do. It is it is the most important thing, and it's in the center. And so I think that comes through in the passion with which we develop our products and the details that we think about and how we think about
our experiences. I also think it just makes for a more happy, engaged workforce. If you're working on something that you're passionate about, life is so much better. And so, you know, I always tell people it's one of my pieces of advice, is you know, do something you're passionate about We spend way too much time at work to do something that feels mundane or not important or not
connected to what you care about. And so I think we're really lucky to have to work in a space where people are passionate about it and can be passionate about it. So I think it's actually one of the really cool things about working at both.
And based in Massachusetts.
Correct, Yeah, headquarters in Massachusetts.
So I mean, is there like a proliferation of like music lovers in New England or something like, could Bose live anywhere? Or does Massachusetts actually fit Bose?
Well, we've been here for so long, right, so our history, our founder, doctor M. R. Bose was a professor at MIT, and so he was a Boston guy and so naturally he wanted this company to be headquartered here, and so our roots run deep in Massachusetts. And we've been here for you know, almost sixty years. So certainly that's true. There's such amazing talent that comes young talent that comes to Boston for college and you know, I mean everyone knows that Boston is sort of this epicenter for college
students and graduate students and technology. And you know, we've got the Berkeley School of Music. So there's a lot of ingredients in Massachusetts that have created great talent for BOS. But we also have people who moved to Massachusetts to be a part of it. And as I said before, we've got people all over the world, So we're not we're certainly headquartered here, but we attract folks globally on the basis of what we do at both.
You've described yourself jokingly as over educated because you have a master's, you have a PhD in mechanical engineering. You went to MIT knowing what higher education costs today and having kids the ages that yours are. Would you do it the same again?
I would actually, you know, I often say the process of getting a PhD taught me more about myself than maybe any other experience I have had in my life, about what I'm good at and what I'm not good at, and what I enjoy and what I'm capable of, And so the process itself, to me was amazing.
What about it? What do they give you?
I think I talk about grit. I love the idea of grit. You know, this idea of goes back to passion and perseverance. It's sort of where those two things meet, and I think that's what I learned at MIT, the ability to persevere through an endless number of challenges that confront you, and while you have a very supportive group of people around you, at the end of the day, you have to find it in you to persevere and to get through those things. And that was valuable life
experience that I use every day. I of course, also learned how to be a great problem solver getting my master's degree my PhD at MIT, and so I think again, that's something that you probably could learn with experience, but I think I got there a lot faster with the help of some pretty amazing professors, advisors, and peers in my educational experience.
Thanks for tuning into Variety strictly Business. This episode was edited by Laurence Schroeder. Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast to hear future episodes featuring conversations with media movers and shapers. Also leave a review on Apple Podcasts and let us know how we're doing.