Episode Details

I am writing this with an Audigo mic sitting next to a hulking broadcast preamp on my desk. The old rig is a nest of cables and knobs. The Audigo is a small square that looks like it fell out of the future and landed in my hand. That contrast is the whole story.

On this episode of Keep Going I talked with Armen Nazarian, founder and CEO of Audigo. He is a drummer who took a long detour through engineering and Tesla before circling back to sound. His company makes a small wireless mic and app that lets musicians record real multitrack audio straight to their phones without feeling like they are engineering a studio every time they press record.

If you grew up on tape decks and four tracks, the promise of the phone era was simple. Recording would get easier. Sharing would get easier. What Armen found when he came back to music was that a lot of the gear companies had not moved very far. The boxes looked nicer, the apps were shinier, but the basic problem was the same. If you were a musician and you wanted decent sound, you needed a pile of equipment and spare hours to set it up.

At Tesla, his job was to sit in the middle of hardware and software and make them feel like one thing. He saw what happens when one team owns the whole stack. The car feels simple even when the system under it is anything but. That experience ruined him for lazy product work. When he picked up a drumstick again and tried to record, he could not stop thinking about the gap. We have supercomputers in our pockets and yet most people still sound like they are playing in the bottom of a well.

So he did the mad thing. He walked away from a great job at one of the most famous companies on earth and started a tiny hardware company in 2020, which is about as bad as a calendar can get for that move. Chip shortages. Travel bans. Factories with shutdowns you could not predict. Parts with twelve week lead times suddenly slipping to sixty five.

Most of us would have taken that as a sign from God to go back to work on electric cars.

Instead, Armen and his small crew started building the first hundred units by hand. They would write code and design boards during the day, then sit and assemble devices at night. Solder, test, pack, repeat. They did not have the luxury of flying to Shenzhen and living on the factory floor. That meant they had to understand every part of their own build before they could trust anyone else with it.

Hardware is hard in a very literal way. If a component changes, you cannot ship a patch. If a factory shuts down, your product line stops. Investors know this. When Armen started raising money, he was doing it at a time when everyone in venture still had the ghost of Juicero in their minds. Add to that the normal suspicion of solo founders and you have a nice little wall in front of you.

His Tesla badge helped a bit. It told people he knew what a production line looked like and that he had lived through at least one intense product culture. It did not make money fall from the sky. He still had to convince people that a small box with some mics in it was worth taking seriously.

Before he left Tesla he did something I respect a lot. He took a week off, told people he was going on an international trip, and stayed home. He had a short list of ideas. He gave each one a full day. He looked at cost, market, and his own stomach. Could he live with this idea for ten years. Could he wake up every day and care about it.

Most people skip that part. They leave out of rage or boredom and then try to figure it out on the fly. He treated that week like a tiny private lab. No slides. No pitch deck. Just him, a notebook, and the question of where to spend the next decade of his life. Audigo is t