Sonos CEO brought BlackBerry to WallStreet

There was once an era when nearly every New York businessperson walking Wall Street was typing away on their BlackBerry. The nifty pager completely revolutionized the workplace because it connected people to their jobs at all hours, whether out for lunch or even at their kid's party. But it wasn't always that way. And the man responsible for bringing this device to the masses: Patrick Spence, current CEO of Sonos.

He sat down with Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi on Opening Bid to tell us the story.

Watch the full interview here.

Video Transcript

One of the first things that I ended up doing was coming here to New York and introducing Blackberry to the banks and brokerages here.

And very quickly, you could see that it was going to be extremely popular with people here because they could always get a hold of each other.

Then they would start to tell everybody else inside the company.

So you were the one responsible for making Blackberry popular on Wall Street.

I mean, you were the guy I did the first first big deal which our first big deal was uh with Merrill Lynch for 1000 Blackberries and I think our stock price on that day went up 50% or something crazy.

Blackberry was black.

It was incredible.

And then did the next biggest one, which at that time was 5000 blackberries to uh citigroup's all M Smith Barney.

So uh pager.

Fun fact, uh we'll keep the age thing going on.

143 on the pager meant I love you.

Sorry.

My ex girlfriend at the time got me a pager.

She paid the bill like I'm like, wow, this is crazy.

I was like 17 and they put like 143.

I'm like, what the hell does that mean?

I, I mean, I love you.

Like, I don't know, it's kind of cool.

But I think the one thing I would say is that you never, when you're in it you never really understand like I, if it's a juggernaut or not because you are trying to make progress and you're trying to, you know, when you're in it, you're trying to just make it work, right?

And you're trying to bring this thing out and you're working so hard.

And what I remember is everybody working so hard to bring it to the world and everybody being so passionate about building something great and just the sense of teamwork around all of that uh was absolutely incredible.

But, but again, it was meant there was a point where myself and I think it was three or four of our interns went all across the United States and physically updated pagers because there was a daylight savings time bug.

So we had to go physically update about 10,000 pagers that were in warehouses all across the United States, a variety of back alleys and different places that had these, we would go in, plug them in the computer, update them and do it.

And so I also think oftentimes it's viewed as very glorious of these things, but in getting, you know, into the details, that means just doing what it takes to make sure that this is going to be successful and that's what I love.

I love that aspect and we have it at Sonos of just getting in there to make sure that it's gonna happen.