We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Akarsh Vinod a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Akarsh, so great to be with you and I think a lot of folks are going to benefit from hearing your story and lessons and wisdom. Imposter Syndrome is something that we know how words to describe, but it’s something that has held people back forever and so we’re really interested to hear about your story and how you overcame imposter syndrome.
Imposter syndrome is something that has been with me since my earliest years. Growing up, I was always one of only a few kids that looked like me in my school and neighborhood. My parents were the first ones in the family to leave India and migrate to a new country, so I was constantly reminded both inside and outside the home of how I was not like those around me.
The first time I consciously started to recognize my imposter syndrome and began to overcome it was when I graduated college and went into my first job as a robotics & automation process engineer in a car brakes manufacturing plant in rural South Carolina. Not only was I an untrained, fresh-out-of-college grad being thrown into a highly technical role for which I had zero experience, but I was once again one of a very small number of people who looked South Asian in the company (in fact, in the entire town).
That job was one of the hardest and most instructive experiences in my life to date. I was one of only 12 engineers in the whole company and I was responsible for everything related to robotics & automation in the plant. What’s more, there had never been another robotics/automation engineer in the company before and there was no training or instructions for the role whatsoever. I was responsible for figuring out the most impactful automation problems to solve, how to do it, and execute every aspect to completion. Programming the robot software, designing the operator UI, identifying the hardware requirements, modeling, machining and assembling the custom mechanical components, and even understanding & designing all safety/compliance requirements – you name it, I had to figure out how to do it.
As scary as it was to be a 21-year-old in that position, I’m very grateful for the experience because it helped me learn an important lesson about life: critical thinking is more important than expertise. While I don’t think imposter syndrome ever really goes away, I’ve learned that solving problems is much more about the time you spend trying to understand the problem than it is about having some previous expertise or training in the area. Ultimately, adult life is always going to be full of new challenges that you have never encountered before, whether it be in your career, as a parent, as a partner, as a caregiver, or anything else. Nobody is better equipped to figure it out than the person who takes the time to understand the problem and seek out a solution.
I’ve brought this lesson with me throughout the years and it is one of the reasons why I took the plunge into entrepreneurship, building a multi-room audio company focusing on making listening an easy & seamless experience for consumers. You face new challenges every day as an entrepreneur, whether it’s related to administrative challenges, technology challenges, supply chain challenges, or marketing & sales challenges. Whenever new challenges come my way, I’ve learned to take a breath, push down that fight-or-flight instinct that comes with unfamiliar situations, and remind myself that I’m the most qualified person to find a solution to my life problems. You just have to take one step at a time and be ready to learn.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I started Dio in order to make it easy & seamless to listen to audio in the house compared to the clunky audio devices that currently exist. We launched our first product last year, the Dio Node, which is a super easy to use but extremely versatile Wi-Fi speaker that you can put all over your home and to listen to your audio anywhere. Without needing an extra app or voice assistant, our speakers let you play any audio from your phone to any speakers around the home. We really designed these speakers to work seamlessly and without any extra hassle, and we even made it cross-compatible with higher end systems like Sonos so that you have the freedom to mix and match your home audio products for different spaces.
I’m a huge audiohead – I listen to podcasts, audiobooks, and music every chance I get. It’s even part of my daily routine: wake up, throw on a podcast to catch up on my daily news, hop in the shower, get dressed, make breakfast, and start my day. However, I realized that modern day audio devices are really holding us back from enjoying our audio in this way. You’re forced to either carry around extra physical hardware like Bluetooth speakers and earphones just to listen around the house, or you need to invest in fancy home theater systems that were originally designed for affluent audiophiles.
For me, I just got tired of having to disconnect and reconnect to various Bluetooth speakers in my home just to keep up with my audio content, and the few smart home speakers I tried did a truly awful job for audio – restricting what apps I could listen to, having unreliable playback, and requiring lengthy setup processes to set up features I never wanted like voice assistants and smart home control. I looked at it all and thought, “I can probably do a better job than that”, and began my journey to create the Dio Node.
Since we launched last year, we’ve had some really excellent reception, with several YouTubers giving us raving reviews, a feature in the nation’s largest technology subscription box last Christmas season, and consistent 5-star reviews on our website. It’s amazing what you can create when you put people first and build for simplicity, and I hope Dio can continue setting the standard for the products we deserve in our homes.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
I don’t think there is ever a cookie-cutter way to become a successful entrepreneur or problem-solver. However, from my own life so far, I’ve found the following principles to be fundamental in guiding me through many of my challenges.
1) Comfort with Ambiguity: This may sound like the most cliché job-interview-esque response, but I’ve found that the most important quality I’ve been forced to develop as an adult is a general comfort with the fact that there may not be a clearly defined outline to solve all my problems. As a school kid, it always seemed like life was just about following a syllabus to success. However, as an adult, I’ve found it much more important to be able to approach any problem as though you’re the one who needs to solve it, without the safety net of punting the issue to a parent or teacher. As an entrepeneur and CEO, you often have to deal with the problems that nobody else on your team have been able to solve, so you have no other choice but to get comfortable and start figuring it out.
2) Fail Fast, Not Hard: Through my experience in corporate America, I’ve found that most people are trained to fear failure. People usually need to highlight only their successes in order to get that promotion, earn that bonus, or climb the ladder. When it comes to spending your own money and resources to build a company, however, you don’t really have an opportunity to just pause and pat yourself on the back for your successes. As a result, you need to become comfortable looking for where the failures are and figuring out how to resolve them. One of my mottos now is to “fail fast, not hard” so that the focus is on validating (or invalidating) ideas quickly before they become a chance to really hurt you in the long run. It all starts with a comfort with failure, and then a focus on finding and resolving the failures quickly.
3) There Is No Auto-Pilot: You’re probably seeing a theme come up with my answers here, but I’ve really internalized the idea that there is very little in life where you can truly operate on autopilot. I’m a big believer in having a growth mindset, which to me means that you need to be ready to get hands-on and learn whenever life presents you with your next challenge. We humans all have similar-sized brains and our challenges rarely reach “rocket science” levels – just apply yourself to a challenge and you’ll quickly find the next step to take towards the solution.
Is there a particular challenge you are currently facing?
With all my words about growth mindset and comfort with ambiguity, I guess it’s my turn to share about my own current challenges. Through some miracle, we’ve gotten to the point where we have a strong product that people actually seem to love as well as a scaleable supply chain. However, it still feels like day 0 because the next big challenge is to figure out how to get ourselves out there and sell more speakers!
Developing a consumer brand is one of the most gargantuan tasks I’ve faced to date, because it involves a whole lot of educating customers about your product, building trust with customers in who you are and your product, and finding the right channels that people are looking for your solution on. With zero prior experience in consumer marketing & sales, I’ve been learning a whole lot about the wide variety of building blocks that need to come together to make a successful brand.
The good news is that I’m actually learning quite a lot and building some strong connections (and friendships, too) along the way. My focus has been on pushing forward in two areas to establish ourselves: firstly, in having a more established digital presence where people can find Dio including your classic e-commerce strategies around SEO, influencers, paid advertising, etc; the second is about scaling up exposure to our product & brand through key partnerships with other companies in home & technology sectors. I’m always happy to connect with anyone who’d like to partner with our brand in any way, so don’t hesitate to reach out!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://dioconnect.com
- Instagram: @diospeakers
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/diotech
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akarsh-vinod/
- Twitter: @DioTechnologies
Image Credits
Jun Chen, Johnavon Hojun Kim, Deejay Bui
so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
