Before Jon Kirchner ran an audio company, he worked as a whitewater rafting guide. It is a useful apprenticeship for someone who will spend his career explaining that volume and leadership have very little to do with each other. A river requires a plan, a crew that understands it, and a guide who can keep his composure when the water becomes unreasonable. The rapids are unlikely to be impressed by a job title.
Years later, Kirchner put the lesson this way: “There’s very little you can do excited that you can’t do better calm and focused.” His business career gives that belief an unusually practical test. He has helped grow DTS, run it, followed it into Xperi, and led through a merger and a separation. Along the way, he has had to abandon things that worked.
The accountant gets a different assignment
Kirchner’s route into entertainment technology began with economics at Claremont McKenna College. A professor encouraged him to attend a campus job fair. He came away with five interviews and four offers, choosing Price Waterhouse. The advice he had gathered from people already working was to learn accounting. He took additional accounting courses before graduating. There are more glamorous ways to enter the movie business. There are fewer ways that make a balance sheet less mysterious.
His early work involved dispute analysis and operational restructuring, examining how businesses could run more efficiently. That background matters to the kind of executive he became. A new technology can be fascinating while the business built around it is heading for trouble. Understanding the financial machinery gives a leader another way to read the situation, beyond the enthusiasm of the people who invented it.
In 1993 he joined DTS as its eleventh employee. The move placed a former accounting professional inside a small company with ambitions in movie sound. Steven Spielberg was an early investor. DTS technology reached cinema audiences with Jurassic Park, released that year. Dinosaurs provided a rather persuasive demonstration of the value of a good sound system.
Kirchner’s responsibilities expanded across finance and operations. He served as chief financial officer, chief operating officer and president before becoming CEO in 2001. He joined the board in 2002 and became chairman in 2010. This was a long apprenticeship inside one business, with successive jobs exposing him to different reasons a promising idea might succeed or stall.
Recognition came from both the business and entertainment worlds. In 2011, the Producers Guild of America included him in its Digital 25: Leaders in Emerging Entertainment. In 2012, he received the Ernst & Young Technology Entrepreneur of the Year Award for Greater Los Angeles. The two honors reflect the territory he occupied: running a technology business whose work supported the experience of films, music and games.
A dinosaur is a difficult thing to walk away from
DTS grew beyond theatrical sound into home entertainment, mobile devices and automotive applications. Kirchner was building a company whose technology could travel with the audience. The customer might be sitting in a cinema, wearing headphones or getting into a car. Each setting brought different partners and commercial demands. The recognizable letters had to stand for something useful in all of them.
The uncomfortable part came when the film-based theatrical operation that had established the business faced a digital future. Kirchner has described selling that part of the company as an emotionally difficult decision. Success had given the technology a powerful claim on the organization’s affections. The market was making a different argument.
He now uses the episode to explain why leaders have to question their attachment to past achievements. A business can become very good at defending the thing that made it important. That competence can leave it poorly prepared to do something else. For Kirchner, objectivity meant considering an exit from a business that carried the company’s origin story.
“Numbers is the language of business today, no matter the position.”
Jon Kirchner
His accounting background and his entertainment career meet at precisely this point. Numbers provide a way to challenge nostalgia. They do not make the decision pleasant. Nor does selling a business erase the work that went into it. It creates room for a different allocation of attention and money, which is a less sentimental proposition than preserving a monument.
One career, several corporate nameplates
In December 2016, DTS was acquired by the business that became Xperi. Kirchner became president, then succeeded Tom Lacey as chief executive in June 2017. In June 2020, Xperi and TiVo combined, with Kirchner leading the merged company. The career remained continuous even as the organizational chart required fresh stationery.
The TiVo combination added discovery, television software, data and advertising to a portfolio already associated with sound and connected cars. Kirchner described the initial conversations in 2019 as discussions about partnerships. As they progressed, a merger appeared to offer a closer fit. The opportunity was to combine technologies that improved entertainment with technologies that helped people find it.
Then came a separation. In October 2022, the product business became independent Xperi Inc.; the former parent, holding the intellectual-property licensing operation, became Adeia. The distinction could sound administrative until one considered the customers. Patent enforcement could put one part of the organization in litigation with electronics manufacturers that another part wanted to sell products to. Corporate togetherness had its complications.
On October 3, Kirchner rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. More than a hundred employees, relatives and partners gathered for the occasion. It was drizzling outside. Inside, the team celebrated a business with a new legal identity and an entertainment portfolio built over many years. Kirchner had reached another beginning without having changed his underlying field.
The next problem arrives before you press play
His present work at Xperi concerns a familiar household negotiation: deciding what to watch. Entertainment can be plentiful and still awkward to reach. Different services have different interfaces, and viewers have to work across them. A television may have a beautiful picture while the search for something worth displaying becomes an evening’s principal activity.
At CES in January 2025, Xperi announced that Sharp would bring smart TVs powered by TiVo to the United States. Kirchner’s argument centered on organizing the experience around content across streaming services and live television. TiVo’s discovery technology would help assemble choices in one interface. For him, the attraction was making the route to entertainment easier to follow.
The same commercial logic reaches into the car. A vehicle’s media system brings broadcast radio and internet-delivered entertainment into close quarters. Xperi’s DTS AutoStage combines those worlds, with audio and video features depending on the model, market and configuration. Partnerships matter here because the experience must work within a carmaker’s product and across countries.
In July 2026, BYD selected AutoStage as its exclusive in-car media platform for future vehicles in major international markets. BYD became the fourteenth major automaker to adopt it, with deployment planned to begin in the fourth quarter of 2026 or earlier. That is a future rollout, rather than a claim that every BYD already has the software. The distinction matters when measuring an executive’s plans against delivery.
Focus, with the television occasionally on
Kirchner’s public descriptions of himself are consistent with the rafting lesson. Asked for his personal superpower in 2021, he chose “Focus.” Asked about a comfort television binge, he named The Crown. He also valued the chance to have more frequent family dinners and watch his children grow and learn. The business of entertainment still leaves room for dinner.
His account of developing as a manager includes a less flattering admission. Earlier in his career, he assumed that if he could work something out, other people should be able to do the same. He has described learning to measure progress through the movement of a team, and to question the beliefs behind his own behavior. A crowded personal to-do list could no longer be the whole definition of a productive day.
That reflection adds some texture to the steady executive biography. Being comfortable with numbers does not automatically make someone effective with people. Delegating requires allowing others to approach a problem with different strengths. For a leader who has spent decades accumulating experience, leaving room for someone else’s judgment may be another form of letting go.
His more recent writing keeps returning to where the audience meets the technology. In August 2026, he published a LinkedIn article about competition inside the automotive cabin. In June, he wrote about helping fans find live sports. Both subjects fit the direction of his operating work. A viewer or listener has to reach the event before any improvement in its presentation can count.
The dashboard has to add up
The financial and operating figures make the current chapter more concrete. At the end of the second quarter of 2026, Xperi reported 6.3 million monthly active users on TiVo One, its advertising platform. AutoStage’s cumulative footprint reached 17 million vehicles. Those are different measures of reach, and neither is a count of paying subscribers.
For that quarter, revenue was $114.5 million, compared with $105.9 million a year earlier. Advertising and related revenue rose 54 percent. Xperi also reported a GAAP net loss of $1.5 million. Growing distribution and improving results remain distinct tasks. The figures give Kirchner evidence for the strategy while leaving the economic work visible.
His career has moved from a small audio company to software embedded in televisions and vehicles. It has required acquisitions, combinations and departures, all around a persistent interest in how people experience entertainment. The rafting guide’s principle remains a useful way to read those decisions: understand the conditions, explain the route, keep the crew moving. And when the route changes, have the composure to change with it.