His Engineering Genius Kept His Car Safe In His Neighborhood. Now He May Revolutionize The Speaker Industry.

As soon as he saw the police down the street, he knew it was a setup. 17-year-old Erik Young had two choices: swallow the product and risk dying (if he couldn’t spit it back up in time) or almost certainly get his first arrest. He chose door #1 and evaded arrest, but he also sensed that his close call was a sign from above. His father, a dealer himself, dealt his conscience a final blow by convincing him he’d never be lucky enough to escape again, so that night he quit the game for good and never looked back.

Growing up in the streets of west-central Orlando, at the time rated one of America’s most dangerous cities, he’d honed his engineering ingenuity out of necessity. Determined to protect his car at all costs, Erik engineered a sophisticated car control and surveillance system that allowed him to lock his doors, turn the engine on/off and view the car’s cameras from his laptop, anywhere in the world. Little did he know that years later he would apply that same imaginative problem solving approach to develop his flagship wireless speaker product.

At his father’s urging, he attended college and a few months before graduation from the University of Central Florida, he used a friend’s badge to attend the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) annual conference. There he took a 100-question verbal test on the spot and blew it out of the water. Amazed, the Hewlett-Packard (HP) representative told him that he had to come work for HP, and he did. After just a few years, he didn’t just distinguish himself at HP. He somehow managed to ingratiate himself within the highest ranks of technology research—and along the way garnered inventor rights for six patents. These days he’s determined to revolutionize the $27 billion wireless speaker industry with the introduction of Audios, the first fully cableless loudspeaker—no wireless router or Bluetooth required. With mentors and investors like Guitar Hero founder Charles Huang and venture capitalist pioneer Andy Rachleff, he just might do it.

Arguably, Erik’s meteoric rise is proof positive of the tremendous power of creativity, grit and stubborn genius. Particularly for young people of color growing up in blighted and impoverished areas, his example of success is not just motivating but highly instructive as well. While data shows that only about six patents per million are granted to Black people, Erik has already received six, and he’s just getting started. An inspiration for anyone seeking to conquer, innovate and disrupt, Erik offers the following advice to young professionals hungry to realize their dreams in the face of adversity.

Become a prime protégé candidate

While everyone knows that having strong mentors is often an important career accelerant, what is less understood is how to secure those critical mentors—real mentors that dig in and guide you unselfishly, not mere names on a mentoring match form. The Fast Company article “The Best Way to Get a Mentor? Stop Asking for One,” quotes Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In, “Instead, of telling young people, ‘Get a mentor and you will excel,’ we need to tell them, ‘Excel and you will get a mentor.'” Furthermore, the article explains, “You get a mentor by being the kind of person someone would want to mentor.” So, the goal really shouldn’t be “finding” a mentor as much as actively becoming the type of person to attract a mentor.

During his early HP days, Erik realized the importance of making himself an attractive potential protégé—someone whom the busiest, most highly valued thought leaders in the company would actually want to mentor. One strategy that he used effectively was offering to help them with one of their personal projects (without compensation or complaint). “To do so, they had to train me a bit,” explains Young. “Over time, they’d offload more and more of their work to me, all the while teaching me.” Once he had clear lines of communication with a target mentor, he followed their advice to the letter, without alteration. “I took the advice and followed it 100% without changing a thing,” explains Young. “As a result, they felt responsible if things didn’t work out for me. Best of all, they had the power to correct the issues I faced.”

Leaving HP and venturing out on his own meant approaching venture capitalists (VCs) for funding—a daunting task by any measure, particularly for a young Black man without the typical Silicon Valley pedigree. For mentorship on how to approach VCs, Jonathan Speed became more than a mentor; he became a father figure really. “When I first met Erik, I was immediately struck by his enthusiasm, honesty, drive—and keen interest in supporting his community (personal and professional),” explains Speed. “To advise-mentor Erik is easy and enjoyable, as he puts in the work from coding and prototyping, to understanding the nuts and bolts of business creation (board minutes to financial projections to partnerships), to asking hard questions of himself and those who mentor him.”

Wealthfront President and CEO Andy Rachleff typically only mentors/invests with former students, but with Erik, he made an exceedingly rare exception. “I was immediately impressed by the way he had embraced the lean startup methodology,” explains Rachleff. “He had a far greater appreciation of its nuances than the students I teach it to at Stanford Graduate School of Business. I was also in awe of how much he had accomplished with so little help; I couldn’t not help.”

Guitar Hero founder Charles Huang didn’t just appreciate Erik’s innovation. He also gravitated to him as an atypical founder with out of the box ideas. “Most startup founders are white or Asian males who graduated from the same 15 universities,” admits Huang. “That's who the VCs back. Tech would do more good for the world if we had diverse founders with diverse ideas.”

Develop a prototype, then write the patent

A young engineer of color, Young regularly faced headwinds trying to garner tangible support for his ideas, so he realized the key was to stop pitching ideas and instead develop the ideas into successful prototypes before pitching. This mindset shift positioned him to pitch innovative concepts that were already proven. “That approach allowed me to see things and come up with solutions that I wouldn’t see otherwise,” explains Young. “It allowed me to come up with unique patentable ways to solve problems.”

The evolution of Audios is a great example of his focus on prototype development. Once he developed two wireless speakers that could connect to each other and playback synchronized music, he progressed to focusing on development of a more advanced battery-powered prototype that could do the same with 16 speakers. “As I continued to build prototypes, I discovered limitations, problems, and eventually solutions,” insists Young. “Those solutions became the foundation for the patents I later wrote.”

Be relentless

Clearly, a key to Young’s ability to defy the odds and fully realize his potential was his persistence and determination. He refused to let obstacles stunt his trajectory. “The story of Audios, is the story of five years of continuous setbacks starting in 2015,” reflects Young. “It is literally the embodiment of five years of relentlessness in search of an idea that I could turn into a viable business.” During his first three years in fact, he repeated a cycle of “failure,” but he continued to problem solve relentlessly. He spent months creating prototypes and even traveled to China to explore manufacturing options only to realize that his profit margins were too low. “Instead of quitting, I updated my idea, built another prototype, determined how much it costs—only to realize that it too had margins too low.” Young repeated this cycle for over three years until he finally built a DJ speaker product that not only solves customers' problems, but could also be produced with profit margins to support a healthy business.

These days Erik is laser focused on securing funding to mass manufacture Audios speakers that he insists will revolutionize the wireless speaker industry. His years of hard work have not just resulted in technological innovation but have also garnered him the critical respect needed to attract heavyweight investors and ultimately grow a successful business. He’s a great example of the fact that success isn’t something that happens to us as much as it is something we create—if we’re determined.