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Nick Millington had just started to feel like a successful software engineer. It was early 2003, and at age 26 he already had a fruitful career at Microsoft. He feared his one-bedroom apartment in Redmond, Washington—filled with a mishmash of bargain-bin furniture and DIY shelving made of cinderblocks and wood planks—wasn’t representative of his upward mobility. He wasn’t a starving student anymore, he was an adult. So Millington did what we all do once we’re able: He bought a larger, more elegant apartment and filled it with brand-new stuff.
“I was starting to think more about the design of my home,” Millington says. “You know, upgrading to the fancier Ikea furniture that looked nice.”
Sonos chief product officer Nick Millington.
Sonos
One nagging problem was how to rig up his music system. Digital music was exploding on the internet, and Millington had spent many hours methodically trying to collect every Billboard Top 40 hit from 1945 onward, amassing a wide range of other, more eclectic music files along the way. But listening to his treasure trove of tunes felt like living in the dorms again. All of his MP3s were stored on the boxy PC he kept in his living room. “At the time, my music setup was a Gateway 2000 tower PC and then I had a laptop,” he says. “I would do terminal server into the PC and play MP3 files there. That wasn’t cutting it for me.”
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