We were lucky to catch up with Akarsh Vinod recently and have shared our conversation below.

Akarsh, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

It was 2017, and I was working as a robotics engineer in a small car brakes manufacturing plant in South Carolina. During that time, I had become completely hooked on podcasts and audiobooks, filling every spare moment with them—during my commute, lunch breaks, workouts, cooking, and even in the shower.

One evening, I was deep into a Brandon Sanderson audiobook when I ran into a problem I didn’t realize I had: I had just finished my shower, but I didn’t want to stop listening. So there I was, standing in my towel, dripping wet and cold, waiting 15-20 minutes for the chapter to end. And that’s when it hit me—why was I stuck? Audio is supposed to be a flexible, seamless medium, yet here I was, tethered to a single speaker, unable to simply continue listening as I moved through my home.

I started searching for solutions, but everything was either clunky, restrictive, or absurdly expensive. Google Nest and Amazon Alexa were locked into walled gardens that didn’t support every audio service I wanted. Sonos had more flexibility, but the cost of setting up a full-home system was completely unreasonable for the average listener. It seemed impossible to have a system that truly let you play any content, anywhere, to any number of speakers, without unnecessary restrictions.

I wanted something simple—something that just worked. And since nothing out there met that need, I decided to build it myself. That’s how the idea for Dio was born.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I started my career as a robotics engineer in the auto industry, but after getting my MBA, I moved into consumer electronics, working at Meta as a Global Supply Manager. My job was to source and manage manufacturers for products like the Oculus Quest headsets and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. While I was getting my MBA, I also started the groundwork for Dio, my audio technology company focused on making it easy, flexible, and private for people to listen to audio across their entire home.

From the start, Dio was built around three key pillars: Simplicity, Flexibility, and Privacy.
• Simplicity meant creating a speaker that anyone could use effortlessly—no complicated setup, no confusing ecosystems, just an intuitive, seamless experience.
• Flexibility meant allowing users to play any content from any device to any number of speakers, without being locked into a single platform. Dio would work with as many existing audio systems as possible to ensure true interoperability.
• Privacy meant designing Dio to function without microphones or data collection, unlike other smart speakers that constantly listen and track user behavior.

The more I developed Dio, the more I realized that the industry had been catering almost exclusively to audiophiles and tech enthusiasts—people who didn’t mind jumping through hoops for high-end audio setups. But the vast majority of listeners, the everyday people who just wanted seamless, high-quality sound throughout their home, had been overlooked. That’s who I’m building for.

Now that Dio is out in the world, I get emails and reviews from customers telling me how they finally found a speaker system that works the way they always wished their smart speakers would. Those moments remind me why I started this in the first place. It still feels like Day 0 in many ways—there’s so much more to build, so many more people to reach.

At the end of the day, I believe Dio is solving a problem that should have been solved years ago: giving people the freedom to listen to their audio seamlessly, without restrictions, without complexity, and without sacrificing privacy. That’s the listening experience every home deserves. And I’m making it happen.

Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.

Yes, I manufacture Dio Node, our first product, which is designed to work seamlessly with Apple devices. Fortunately, I had a strong background in supply chain management from my time at Meta, so I was familiar with the challenges of manufacturing consumer electronics.

One of the biggest strategic decisions I made early on was to launch Dio for Apple users first. Apple’s licensed accessory program (MFi) provided an advantage by giving me access to a shortlist of licensed manufacturers who already had experience building high-quality audio products. This significantly streamlined the search process. I combined this with my own industry knowledge and network to find potential manufacturing partners.

That said, finding a manufacturer isn’t just about picking someone from a list—it’s about making sure they’re the right fit for your specific product. I knew I needed a partner with strong experience in audio and acoustics so that I could focus on the software and user experience. Once I had a shortlist of manufacturers, I requested proposals and evaluated them based on cost, capabilities, communication, and whether I trusted them to execute at a high level.

Even with extensive due diligence, manufacturing is never without its challenges. In our first inventory batch, the manufacturer accidentally uploaded the wrong firmware version to the speakers, which meant that customers couldn’t even set up their devices when they received them. It was a stressful situation, but we had a backdoor method to fix the issue and worked closely with affected customers to resolve it. On the other hand, the hardware quality—particularly the audio performance—was excellent from the beginning, which was something I had prioritized in selecting my manufacturer.

The pandemic also added another layer of difficulty. I kicked off development on Dio Node in August 2021, right in the middle of supply chain disruptions. Some components had lead times as long as 52 weeks, forcing me to make large upfront purchases to ensure we could even have a product to launch. Unexpected costs and delays became a normal part of the process, but I learned that flexibility and planning ahead were key to mitigating risks.

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in manufacturing—one that I didn’t fully appreciate until I was deep in it—is that cash flow is just as critical as the physical production process. At big companies like Meta, the focus is always on driving costs down. But as a startup, your costs will be high no matter what—you simply don’t have the volume to negotiate the same pricing as a Fortune 500 company. What matters far more is lead time and payment terms.

Here’s an example: a consumer electronics product like Dio has hundreds of individual components, many of which have long lead times. A manufacturer will always quote their longest lead time as the time required to build your product, and for electronics, this can be 16–20 weeks. Add in another month for freight shipping, and you’re looking at six months before your inventory even arrives in the U.S. That means any money you pay upfront for parts and production won’t come back to you through sales for at least half a year. That’s a massive cash flow challenge for a small business.

I learned—maybe too late—that negotiating payment terms can be the difference between thriving and running out of money. If you can structure agreements so that you only pay for components once the finished product is ready, or if you can avoid liability for common parts your manufacturer stocks for bigger customers, you can free up a lot of capital to grow your business while waiting for inventory.

At the end of the day, manufacturing isn’t just about making a product—it’s about making sure your business can sustain and scale. Dio has been an incredible learning experience in that regard, and every production run has made me a stronger operator.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

Yes! I started working on Dio in 2019 while getting my MBA, and I kept it as a side project while working full-time at Meta. I ran Dio’s Indiegogo campaign in 2022, launched the product in 2023, and finally went full-time just recently in 2025.

The turning point came when I realized that Dio was steadily growing, even with just my limited time. Our return rate was almost nonexistent, and 6% of customers were coming back to buy more speakers—clear signs that people loved the product. The only thing holding Dio back was my own bandwidth.

The final push came after my daughter was born. During my parental leave, I had time to reflect on where I wanted to focus my energy. The decision wasn’t easy—I walked away from a stable career and some big financial incentives—but I knew that if Dio was going to succeed, it needed my full attention. Now that I’ve taken the leap, I’m more motivated than ever to make Dio a household name.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://dioconnect.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/diospeakers/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/diotech
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/dio-technologies
• Twitter: https://x.com/diotechnologies
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@diospeakers