Schiit Audio is now famous or should that be infamous... most likely because of the company’s scatological name. So why the subtitle? Why might the founding of this company have been so improbable?
According to its co-founder, Jason Stoddard, also the lead author of this book, there were several reasons it was improbable. He lists them as:
• No outside funds, no venture capital, no crowd-funding.
• Founders had been out of the audio business for 15+ years.
• Direct sales
• Started with no staff, from Stoddard’s own garage.
• Products built in the USA.
• First products were inexpensive.
Improbability is not a fixed value, as readers of Douglas Adams’ fabulous book Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy will be well aware. There are many values of improbability. One of these (point two on Stoddard’s list) should have pricked your ears straight away, because it points to the fact that both founders had previously been in the audio business, so they weren’t newbies. As it happens, they’d both been very seriously in the audio business. So when I tell you that Stoddard’s partner in Schiit was actually none other than the very famous audio amplifier designer Mike Moffat, you might already be dividing whatever previous improbability number you’d decided on by a factor of, oh, say about 10 million.
