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“Amped Innovations, for me, began in the mind of the brand new high school graduate version of myself who had just been introduced into the world of engineering.

I only decided to go into an engineering field because I had excelled in math and science throughout my life up to that point, and I knew I could probably get a pretty good job after I finished my degree. The only reason I ended up in the electrical discipline rather than any other engineering discipline is because there were several electrical engineers in my family, including my dad. My dad had been suffering from early-onset-Alzheimer’s for the entirety of my high school years, and choosing to follow in his footsteps was a way for me to continue his legacy (he passed away three years later the summer before my senior year in college). Although I made the decision to pursue electrical engineering, I didn’t really have any kind of passion for engineering or electrical systems at the time. Through a random connection with the local power company, I was able to land a summer internship between high school graduation and the start of my freshman year of college. It was at this internship where I first learned about how electricity was generated. Put very simply, the power plants would generate electricity by rotating a magnet inside of a copper coil, and the electricity that was generated from this process was distributed to thousands of consumers. This fascinated me, and I immediately thought, “Why couldn’t we use other forms of energy to spin the magnetic field inside of the copper coil and scale it down for average consumers to generate their own electricity for their household electronics?” The first idea I had was to invent a hand-crank phone charger. After looking into it, I realized that this idea already existed. I was disappointed (even though looking back this seems like a really dumb idea), but without even realizing it at the time, I had discovered my passion: innovation. After that, I was constantly coming up with ideas to make everyday products better, to automate daily tasks, or to provide new and better ways to solve old problems. This mindset followed me throughout college, and as my knowledge of electronics expanded, I started a list of all the innovative ideas that I could come up with (I still add to this list on a regular basis today). This passion for coming up with new ideas and turning them into a reality is now the foundation of the Amped Innovations brand.

During my first semester of my freshman year of college, I met a fellow electrical engineering student named JC. He was significantly older than me, but I could tell he was a really sharp guy, and we turned out to be pretty good friends despite our age difference. He had gotten a different degree earlier in his life, joined the military, served in Iraq, and come back to school to give engineering a shot. He shared the passion of innovation with me to a large extent, but his main passion was something I had not been exposed to very much: making music. He chose to come back and enter the field of electrical engineering because he loved electric guitar and electric guitar amplifiers, and he was fascinated by how they worked. I think he was constantly chasing what can only be described as “acoustic nirvana,” and he wanted to acquire the ability to achieve it through his own designs. By chance, we ended up being lab partners for a computer programming lab our freshman year, and because we were both pretty good students, we became study partners. I took several classes with JC over the course of the next 3 and a half years, and we spent hours upon hours studying together during this time. During our junior year after a good bit of circuit design coursework, JC developed a pre-amp boost pedal for himself that was vastly superior to any other boost pedal he had tried before. I think he was able to come up such a superior product after only a few years of electronics classes because he seemed to eat, breathe, and sleep quality music gear. He was constantly researching how quality gear worked, and he had already spent 20 plus years trying to make his music equipment sound better and better. This experience in conjunction with his natural ability to pick up on and fully comprehend circuit design made it only natural for him to develop his own quality gear. Soon after, he built a website for himself and started selling his pedals.

When our final year of undergrad was approaching, JC and I decided to team up on a senior design project together along with a few other guys. We discussed several ideas, but after some consulting from the senior design professor, we landed on an idea that would make vacuum tube electric guitar amplifiers more user-friendly, safer, and less expensive to maintain: Tube Amp Tuner (TAT). Because our project was innovative (nothing else like it exists) and amp-related, we came up with the team name “Amped Innovations.” It was a lot of work, but over the course of the next two semesters, we were able to complete a working hardware prototype with a “bare-bones” smartphone application to go along with it just prior to graduation. During our time of hardware development, JC and I had some discussions and ultimately decided that we would continue working together on this project (along with other projects) after we graduated and become business partners. We decided to start the business so we could chase our mutual passion for innovation and continue developing new and exciting products in the future in addition to getting TAT ready for production. About a week after graduation, I completed the paperwork for Amped Innovations to become a legitimate business, and it was officially founded. Within the same week, I started a MBA program (which I had applied for several months earlier) to acquire the business education that I thought would be necessary to run our new start-up company. In the meantime, we used our knack for electronics to start another side business (which is now called iRepair-Anywhere) to provide electronics repair services for consumers as a way to generate funding for Amped Innovations. This repair service has evolved quite a bit, but it is still in operation today. After finishing my MBA a year later, we began selling JC’s pedals as an Amped Innovations’ product, and as of right now, it is still the only product we have on the market. Although the initial hardware for TAT has been functional for a while, the product is still under development. The hardware has gone through a couple of iterations in order to decrease both the cost and size, and we are having to develop the fully loaded iOS and Android applications in house. When TAT is completed and is moved into production, we will move on to develop the next idea on the “list” and continue striving towards our vision of becoming the company known for innovating everything.”

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