Who is nicholas millington

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Toggle navigation Demo. Experience CompAnalyst: Demo. Nicholas Millington Executive Compensation. Data Year:. Yet, even though his efforts have proven critical to the company's success, Millington tends to credit others a lot more than himself.

He seems more concerned with solving problems than bragging about his solutions, which may be why he's never sought a greater spotlight or given an in-depth interview before talking to WIRED. Since , Sonos has sold 19 million audio devices—each of them a representation of the work done by Millington and his team—into 7 million homes. The same speakers still top many best-of guides. By most measures, it's a story of success.

But today, Sonos is sailing rougher seas. The company has also had more than one round of layoffs as it has dealt with an evolving competitive landscape. The rise of the voice-assistant smart speaker, in particular, took the company by surprise. Just this year, shortly before going public , Sonos released a new soundbar that interacts with voice services from Apple, Amazon, and soon, Google—the same tech giants who have charged forcefully into the multiroom wireless speaker market Sonos built.

It will be up to Millington and his product team to chart a course through the choppy, frenemy-filled waters ahead. To do it, he may help guide the company into new places altogether. Until now, all Sonos products have been shackled to rooms inside your home. In the future, Millington hints, Sonos may create its first speakers and audio products designed to leave the house.

Millington is used to leaving houses. As the son of a British Diplomatic Service officer, he spent his entire childhood globetrotting, but it was his time as a kid in Japan in the s—an era when the country was the worldwide epicenter for electronic innovation—that set him on a path toward tech.

He learned about networking early on as well, subscribing to the first dialup internet service provider in Japan, called TWICS. He ran a Tokyo PC users group on a bulletin board system that predated the web.

Eventually, he landed at Duke University in the US and then went to Microsoft when he graduated in , where he worked on SharePoint, the software maker's online collaboration platform. When Sonos was founded, in , there was no streaming music.

No Spotify. No Pandora. AOL dialup was the most popular way to access the internet , and many families didn't even have Wi-Fi yet. The four founders of Sonos, led by MacFarlane, recognized that digital music would increasingly become a bigger part of consumer's lives.

Their big idea was an ambitious plan to make it possible for anyone to set up a multiroom home speaker network for digital music. At the time, multiroom systems could be purchased, but they were inaccessible. It was typically the domain of high-end installers charging very high prices for stuff that didn't always work terribly well.

Sometimes you had to actually rebuild your home to put in the necessary wiring and speakers. Their plan was to democratize the whole stack. Instead of requiring dedicated wiring or a team of professional installers, Sonos would create Wi-Fi amplifiers "ZonePlayers" that you could tether to the speakers you already owned. Set a Sonos amp in any room of your house, and digital music could be summoned from your computer using a dedicated wireless remote control. You'd be able to move your speaker setup to new rooms, alter which speakers were grouped together, and take the whole arrangement with you if you bought a new home.

By early , the founders had hired Andy Schulert to head up product development. He quickly called on Millington, an old Microsoft colleague, to help solve the most daunting problem the company was facing: how to develop networking tech that would flawlessly sync multiple amplifiers together, transport music between them, and keep them connected and updated through the internet—all over Wi-Fi, which was far less mature back then.

Despite having no audio experience "except for 10 years of piano lessons," Millington moved to Santa Barbara and taught himself what he needed to know about audio synchronization in a matter of weeks. I have always liked to gravitate toward the core problem where 'If we don't solve this, we have no product' and make sure that it's handled in the best possible way. Syncing amps and their speakers wasn't easy. One of the big challenges with multiple speakers is dealing with the accuracy of the human ear, which can quickly detect audio that's out of sync.

You need to synchronize it to less than a millisecond of accuracy to have it be a really pleasurable experience. To get multiple speakers to sync that closely, Millington developed a method of time-stamping all the music traveling between speakers, thereby holding each speaker accountable.

Timestamping made it virtually impossible for Sonos ZonePlayers to get out of sync. The team made another important choice around this time. Instead of designating a permanent master ZonePlayer that centrally ran the entire network, the team created a distributed network in which every Player acted on its own and intelligently communicated with the othersno easy task.

For example, if a user had five ZonePlayers hooked up, Millington couldn't let all five of them fetch music from the internet. It would suck up too much bandwidth and potentially crush a home network.

So he developed a "delegation" process that allowed every ZonePlayer to dynamically assign duties to one another. If one ZonePlayer was removed from the network, another one could pick up the slack and take over its duties—even fetching the music for all the Players, if necessary. Unfortunately, none of this worked over Wi-Fi yet.

John MacFarlane was adamant that the whole system work wirelessly, so Millington turned to mesh networking. This method offers a way to wirelessly connect devices in an ad hoc fashion, so you don't need to rely on a central traffic point like a router to keep the network humming.

Millington taught himself mesh networking in about six weeks. By early , Sonos' wireless mesh networking system was working. Owners would be able to run up to 32 Sonos players in their home, grouping and ungrouping them at will to bundle rooms together, play the same music across an entire floor of their house, or use each player separately.

But code that works in the lab still has to pass real-world tests. They had to figure out what microwaves and cordless phones might do to a Sonos player under the same roof. In the early days of wireless networking, many products didn't use Wi-Fi as frugally as they do today, and some were major bandwidth hogs, causing a lot of headaches for the team.

It was tempting to take the easy road and blame someone's Wi-Fi for everything that went wrong. But for Sonos to succeed as a product, it had to operate in less-than-ideal wireless environments, and several months of troubleshooting ensued.

The intense amount of testing the team went through in that prelaunch phase has been immortalized in code; all Sonos products are packed with onboard Wi-Fi diagnostic tools that can send reports to customer service reps when speakers start having problems.

Sonos' earliest products were amps, and you connected your own speakers. The company's iPod-like hardware remote could control it all. That wireless controller had a screen and direction pad so you could play music without a PC.

Some engineers affectionately referred to it as a "Russian iPod" because of its chunky, jog-wheel-bedecked design. But it was useful, displaying album art and song titles on a small screen, and giving users the ability to group and ungroup speakers.

The company also made a strong effort to simplify setup with three-step instructions. At launch, the ZP was a niche proposition. Wireless multiroom systems were entirely new. Sonos players, though cheaper than a professionally installed wired system, were still fairly expensive, and the fact that they required you to purchase your own speakers was tough to communicate to a mass audience.

Hardcore audiophiles likely understood it, but many of them were already in the market for or owned a professional setup. Still, for a startup like Sonos, it was a promising debut.

The team believed the product worked really well and was reliable, and initial sales were at least decent. As word of mouth began to spread and new ZonePlayer amps arrived, Sonos gained more attention. With the concept of networked audio proven and Sonos' amp business up and running, Millington was promoted to director of advanced development and architecture in In his new role, he assembled a small team of half a dozen engineers to create bold, innovative product ideasa skunkworks team of sorts.

While the rest of the company maintained and improved those wireless amps, he began working on new concepts. With Millington at the helm, Sonos launched its first iPhone app in late the same year the App Store launched.

The company debated whether to charge for the app nobody knew how much apps should really cost back then but decided to make it free. Millington credits the other founders, particularly MacFarlane, for the brisk adoption of iOS. MacFarlane's "a guy who lives three or four years in the future, and he takes for granted things that don't actually exist yet, is kind of how I would describe his mindset," Millington tells me with a smile.

The app eliminated the need for a host PC or that "Russian iPod" wireless controller. In the years that followed, Millington and the team continued to flesh out the app and began adding direct access to music streaming services as listeners stopped hoarding MP3s on their home computer and began turning to services like Pandora, Rhapsody, and Spotify.

Sonos also made a critical decision around this time that continues to define what the company is about: It chose to remain an open platform. The company decided against making its own music service and instead began working to support every audio service on the market in a completely neutral way.

We've never taken any money from a music service or promoted any one of them [over the others]," Millington says. The Sonos app eventually grew to support around services globally , more than any similar platform.

The next milestone project for Millington's team was a full-fledged speaker for Sonos. In early , he hired an audio engineer named Chris Kallai, a self-described "audio nut" who had spent time at Harman and Velodyne. In its early years, Sonos focused on amplifiers instead of speakers because it seemed too difficult for an unknown brand to launch a speaker as its first product.

There were a lot of established companies in the space. Executives also believed that users and reviewers tended to judge speakers differently than amps. Amps are almost always evaluated objectively. With speakers, however, each listener tends to favor their preferred sound signatures.

Either it reproduces the input or it doesn't, whereas with a speaker it's much more subjective. To solve the problem, the company decided to avoid creating a "Sonos sound" of its own. Kallai, Millington, and others decided Sonos speakers would try to replicate what recording engineers heard in the studio as they recorded albums.

They assembled a group of recording artists and engineers to help. Several notable names in music, including Rick Rubin, joined the group. Giles Martin, son of Beatles producer George Martin and overseer of many recent Beatles remasterings, currently heads it up. Millington and others described this as a turning point for the company because of how much it simplified the Sonos proposition. Combined with the new iPhone app, it was a speaker that worked out of the box and sounded fantastic.

It could be used alone or be networked with as many as 31 pieces of Sonos hardware—other Play:5 speakers or older ZonePlayers. It also got more capable over time, thanks to firmware updates that downloaded and installed from the app—refreshing all speakers at once.

The Play:5 earned relatively high marks from reviewers , who liked its sound and features. It helps that the Play:5 stood out among what seemed like a sea of home speakers with iPod docks or then-subpar Bluetooth radios. The success of products like the Play:5 and iPhone app led to a promotion for Millington. He was put in charge of the entire product department at Sonos in early