Member-only story

I Launched My New Speaker Company at 30

Austin Harman, CISSP
5 min readJul 14, 2024

--

Launch of Penn Audio Studio Monitors

When I was in elementary school, someone once asked me what I wanted to do with my life. The correct answer would have been nothing. Jokes aside, I instead responded almost too quickly that I wanted to be an inventor. Those words had never left my mouth before. I hated being put on the spot so Ijust said the first thing that came to my mind. When pressed about what kind of inventor I wanted to be, I eventually said “speakers”. I was more surprised by my own answer than my class mates. That day set in motion a 20 year plan that has now come to a head. At 30, I was able to launch my speaker company Penn Audio at the Infocomm24 Las Vegas show.

I spent much of the 4th grade drawing diagrams of my breakthrough teleportation machine. Inspired by Startrek and Star Wars, I thought often about how to solve virtually impossible tasks. Naturally, my severe case of ADHD helped me to care less than an ounce of a crap about math. I was obsessed with things that normal children wouldn’t care about. I drew diagrams of nuclear reactors on the backs of my tests. By 6th grade, my challenges in school became more pronounced. Finding myself in trouble more often, It became clear to me that the way I thought about the world wasn’t the way other people thought. After berating my math teacher at 17 about their stature in the world, and yet another bout of detention, I realized that I needed to…

--

--

Austin Harman, CISSP
Austin Harman, CISSP

Written by Austin Harman, CISSP

A former Cybersecurity professional turned Entrepreneur. President and CEO of The Penn Group, an Audio Video and Lighting installation company.

No responses yet