Technology

Smart speaker maker Sonos has filed to go public.

In the filing, the company says itaiming to raise up to $100 million in the IPO. However, that number may simply be a placeholder, or it could change as the IPO approaches.

Sonos says that as of March 31, itsold a total of 19 million products to 6.9 million households, with customers listening to 70 hours of content each month.

Revenue is growing — in the six months ending on March 31, the company brought in $655.7 million, up 18 percent year-over-year. In its most recent full fiscal year (2017), it brought in $992.5 million in revenue, an increase of 10 percent from 2016, while its net loss shrank from $38.2 million to $14.2 million.

Looking at the broader landscape, Sonos emphasizes its role as an independent player that can work with music streaming services like Apple Music, Pandora, Spotify and TuneIn.

It also points to the opportunity presented by growing interest in voice assistants — Sonos released its first voice-enabled speaker, the Sonos One, last year, but rather than building its own assistant, it integrates with Amazon Alexa and has plans to add support for AppleSiri (via Airplay 2) and Google Home this year.

&Our system is not — and never will be — an entry gate into a walled garden,& writes CEO Patrick Spence. &We&re deeply committed to keeping Sonos open to every voice assistant, streaming service and company that wants to build on our platform. This approach is unique in our industry, and it requires substantial investment and long-term thinking.&

In terms of risk factors, the company points to its history of losses, the unpredictability of its revenue growth and the fact that it operates in &highly competitive markets& and is &dependent on partners who offer products that compete with our own.&



Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunchventure capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week we were back in the studio withConnie Loizos and myself hanging out with Jai Das, a managing director at Sapphire Ventures. Our beloved Matthew Lynley was off this week, but he&ll be back for the next episode.

This week we had an excellent list of things to get to, first of which was Lyftlatest shopping run. This time Lyftaccreted to itself Motivate, a bike-sharing company that operates various programs in cities like New York City, and San Francisco.

The context for the transaction is threefold. First, Lyft just raised a bundle of money for effectively diddly dilution. Second, Uber bought Jump and there is no FOMO in the market today like ridesharing FOMO. And third, scooters, which now lurk in the background of any and every ridesharing conversation so the big shops are on a bit of defense.

The sum is that Uber and Lyft now own bike companies, which feels a bit 2017.

But moving alongUnicorn Row we quickly found ourselves at the door of Airbnb which is prepping for a 2019-2020 IPO and a change to its personnel comp cadence, the latter due to its age and a market trend that Das noted concerned employee comp and shareholder dilution.

In other news, Airbnb needs a CFO, so if you are in the market thatwho to call.

Next up was Automation Anywhereepic $250 million Series A which brought the software process-automation company to a valuation of $1.8 billion. The firm helps companies execute repetitive software tasks at a fraction of the cost of having humans click the buttons.

And we wrapped with Juul, everyonefavorite e-cigarette company that has simply beautiful financials. Whether itethical is something that we spent a moment talking about.

So fire up your vape or just hit play and we&ll be right back in seven days.

Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin talked about a wide range of topics during an interview with Jon Evans at TechCrunch Sessions: Blockchain. He was surprisingly balanced and stated multiple times that everyone has different needs and ithard to live in a world where everything is centralized or decentralized.

&Back in 2013, when GHash had 51 percent everybody freaked out. It's happening a second time and people aren't really talking about it this much,& Buterin said. And ittrue that if you look at Bitmain alone, the company is edging toward 51 percent of network hash rate.

In addition to potential 51 percent attacks, it causes issues due to concentration. Buterin mentioned the Sichuan flood that are potentially affecting mining operations over there.

So itclear that Buterin wants to make Ethereum as decentralized as possible by design. But what he wants and what the community wants might be different. Buterin is fine with that.

&The Ethereum Foundation tries very hard to be a decentralized organization,& he said. &We try very hard not to have a very hard divide, such as you're on the inside and you're on the outside.&

One of the big challenges to overcome to make Ethereum truly decentralized comes down to user authentication. Sure, itpossible to generate a private key and a public key to manage your wallet yourself. Sending ETH is all about signing a transaction so itnot that complicated.

But what happens if you lose the keys What happens if you lose your password &If all user authentication methods end up failing it's going to be hard to reach mainstream adoption,& Buterin said.

&I'm interested in social recovery, multi-key schemes,& he added. Buterin then explained WeChatsocial recovery system. If you lose your password, WeChat asks you to select people in your contact list within a big list of names. You can also imagine some sort of offline validation.

&If all fails we'll all use Coinbase — that'll be less fun,& he said. That remark led to a bigger discussion about decentralized exchanges.

&I definitely hope centralized exchanges go burn in hell as much as possible,& Buterin said. In particular, he thinks thereno reason some projects need to pay $10 to $15 million in listing fees to let people trade their tokens on centralized exchanges.

According to him, centralized exchanges exist because they serve as an interface between the fiat world and the cryptocurrencies. &And the fiat world only has centralized gateways,& he said.

As for crypto-to-crypto exchanges, Buterin says that itstill early days. But there are already clear advantage from a userpoint of view. For instance, you don&t need to sign up or login. You can send money to a wallet and define an output address. This way, exchanges only act as input/output tunnels, transferring tokens from one address to another in two different currencies.

Buterin also talked about private blockchains and other projects inspired by Ethereum. &A lot of these projects ended up not going very far. Some of them ended up being not decentralized at all,& he said.

For instance, some companies spun up 7 nodes, but they were all controlled by the same company. So itnot exactly decentralized. &With the public network, you have a network of 16,000 computers,& Buterin said.

Once again, Buterin also said that he can&t blame them entirely. &In a lot of industries, I understand that it comes down to compromises,& he said. Sometimes you have regulatory obligations that force you to centralize at least a bit.

&Even Plasma chains are a better way to make that compromise,& Buterin said. &You get the efficiency of a centralized server, almost the same code of a centralized server, but a public blockchain fallback in case the centralized server ends up failing.&

At some point, Buterin also made fun of Bitcoinendless disagreements. The issue is that you have multiple groups of people who truly believe they&re right and that you should do something to ‘move forward&.

During a previous panel, Karl Floersch from the Ethereum Foundation said that Buterin was pretty good at compromising. And Buterin has a say in the culture of the Ethereum community.

&Growth of the communities definitely depends on what the earliest members believe. I think it is something where we do make a deliberate effort to basically promote the right values and attract the right people both in an inclusive sense and in an exclusive sense,& he said.

&It also means that we make a culture that is hostile to people who take themselves to seriously.&

Watch my panel on scaling Ethereum: