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100: The Audio Startup That Turned the Volume All the Way Up
Win a free kindle copy of this book!
14 days and 06:34:57
100 copies available
U.S. only
They Said Small Speakers Could Never Sound This Big. They Were Wrong.
Mattias Scheek and his brother grew up building speakers out of secondhand parts in their parents’ home in Amsterdam. With no money, no connections, and no safety net, they made a technological breakthrough that caught the attention of the global audio industry. Six years later, Sonos acquired their company, Mayht, for $100 million.
100: The Audio Startup That Turned the Volume All the Way Up is Scheek’s firsthand account of what it really takes to bring an idea from concept to acquisition. From prototyping through the night to navigating investor politics and pandemic shutdowns, this book captures the raw, unfiltered reality of startup life.
Readers will learn how
Turn resource constraints into competitive advantages Negotiate with investors, partners, and acquirers at every stage Protect intellectual property while building trust with industry leaders Build momentum that turns interest into action Know when to hold firm and when to walk away
Whether you are launching your first venture or scaling toward a major milestone, 100 offers practical wisdom and real inspiration for anyone who believes their idea is worth fighting for.
Mattias Scheek and his brother grew up building speakers out of secondhand parts in their parents’ home in Amsterdam. With no money, no connections, and no safety net, they made a technological breakthrough that caught the attention of the global audio industry. Six years later, Sonos acquired their company, Mayht, for $100 million.
100: The Audio Startup That Turned the Volume All the Way Up is Scheek’s firsthand account of what it really takes to bring an idea from concept to acquisition. From prototyping through the night to navigating investor politics and pandemic shutdowns, this book captures the raw, unfiltered reality of startup life.
Readers will learn how
Turn resource constraints into competitive advantages Negotiate with investors, partners, and acquirers at every stage Protect intellectual property while building trust with industry leaders Build momentum that turns interest into action Know when to hold firm and when to walk away
Whether you are launching your first venture or scaling toward a major milestone, 100 offers practical wisdom and real inspiration for anyone who believes their idea is worth fighting for.
169 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 27, 2026
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Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
The $100 Million Speaker Hidden Under a Black Sock: Mattias Scheek’s “100” and the Fine Art of Looking Underfunded While Becoming Expensive
Mayht’s journey from homemade secrecy to a Sonos acquisition is funny, frantic, technically absorbing, and unexpectedly revealing about the patents, people, leverage, and dependencies required to make an improbable invention commercially real.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | October 16th, 2026
Duct tape would have been too dignified. Before one of Mayht’s early American trips, Mattias Scheek and his brother Timothy packed prototype speakers into numbered aluminum briefcases and hid the internals beneath covers sewn from large black socks. There is almost the whole company: valuable intellectual property under improvised hosiery, engineering ambition traveling with the seams exposed. “100: The Audio Startup That Turned the Volume All the Way Up” ends with Sonos buying Mayht for roughly $100 million, but the number matters less than the education that precedes it. The brothers discover that possessing something valuable and making somebody else value it on your terms are two different achievements.
Early in the memoir, Scheek gives that education a family history. He and Timothy grow up in Amsterdam in a family of Surinamese descent, with little spare money and memories of overt racism, but also with parents who refuse to let shortage define the household. Their father’s “If not, then still” becomes a family reflex. The brothers take speakers apart, rebuild them, sell elaborate custom designs, then leave that business when Timothy’s experiments point toward a compact architecture capable of producing far more sound than its size should permit. Scheek names the lesson early: scarcity can train invention. Because it comes from childhood rather than a management seminar, it has weight.
Mayht soon discovers how many things ingenuity cannot pay for. Patent searches cost money. Prototypes need components. Investors ask for due diligence. Manufacturers want technical information the founders would rather keep covered by those black socks. Engineers need salaries. Corporate executives demand demonstrations Mayht cannot choreograph. Financing buys time, but time immediately acquires a burn rate. Outside expertise fills gaps, then introduces processes slower than the founders’ build-test-break rhythm. Attention from large companies creates possibilities and new demands for proof. Scarcity never leaves the room. It changes clothes.
Even the three-part design refuses the soothing fiction that progress makes things simpler. “Building the Foundation” becomes “Survival Mode,” then “The Acquisition,” but the ugliest fight arrives after Sonos has made the offer the founders spent years trying to deserve. Chapter titles such as “Excitement Versus Need,” “How Having More Demands More,” and “Big Break Versus Breaking Point” tell us what the chronology keeps demonstrating: every solution invents a more sophisticated problem. A little company can survive on improvisation. A valuable company has shareholders.
The brothers therefore acquire power in an odd way: by acquiring people they need. Delft-linked institutions help turn an invention into an investable entity. Max van den Berg brings corporate access. Lawyers make patents and contracts defensible. Engineers convert prototypes into repeatable technology. Advisers supply knowledge and introductions. Later investors give Mayht alternatives to earlier investors. Eventually competing corporate interest gives the founders bargaining power. They become more powerful by needing more people. The price is that many of those people now have a legitimate reason to care about what happens next.
Relationships rescue them too often for a cynical reading to survive. Max gets meetings the brothers cannot. Advisers know which questions they have not learned to ask. Outside money lets Mayht survive long enough for the technology to mature. When Exeger and Martin Garrix join the cap table, the new money reduces dependence on the largest existing shareholder. Even that shareholder, later the chief obstacle to the Sonos sale, is credited with helping force a higher price. The plot keeps distributing causality among more people, even while some closing rhetoric prefers the cleaner language of character and persistence.
In one of the most useful failures, Mayht enters a demonstration believing it knows how to make its invention persuasive. Then the variables disappear from its control one by one. A prospective partner places the speaker in the center of the room, where it loses helpful acoustic reinforcement. The partner chooses the music. Its engineers run the measurements. Someone drives the prototype beyond its capacity. The sound distorts. No prototype bursts into flame; the embarrassment is worse for being technically mundane. The founders have spent years learning how to stage proof, and now somebody else owns the stage.
Precisely after that demonstration, the book cuts to a section called “Running Out of Runway.” Startup readers know the phrase: cash divided by monthly burn, a clock disguised as arithmetic. Scheek then tells us his father’s cancer has metastasized and the doctors cannot save him. During a family trip that may be a farewell, his father announces during a card game that he will do ten push-ups. He reaches ten and continues to twenty. A startup may run out of runway; a body does too. Suddenly “If not, then still” is no startup slogan. It is a man on the floor counting past ten when counting will not alter his diagnosis.
After scenes like that, one sees why Scheek’s instructional habit works and why it can work too hard. His sentences are mostly short or medium-length, clear without becoming skeletal, and comfortable with venture finance, patents, acoustics, and corporate development. Jargon usually arrives attached to a consequence. He also lets his younger self look ridiculous. He remembers judging accomplished people by their cars and recounts sending his lawyer an email warning that a prospective partner might steal Mayht’s technology, then noticing that the prospective partner was copied on it. Parentheses often act as a second, less ceremonial narrator, slipping in embarrassment before the successful founder can look too prophetic.
Particularly characteristic is the speed with which embarrassment becomes method. When Mayht is almost out of money, the founders persuade an investor to make an early payment by describing the problem as preserving momentum rather than averting collapse. Scheek draws the rule himself: “When you have no leverage, controlling the narrative becomes your leverage.” It is a sharp description of that negotiation, and also where memoir shades into business-book doctrine. A sentence can change another person’s understanding of your predicament. It cannot indefinitely change the predicament. “100” does not always police the difference between an earned lesson and a portable law.
And some of its own scenes quietly rebel. By mid-2020, an ambitious new speaker architecture still refuses to behave. After months of frustration, Mattias and Timothy test an idea they almost regard as capitulation: remove one sophisticated new component and reinstall an older design from 2018. The backward move works. That is a better account of persistence than several aphorisms around it. The founders preserve the objective, not every method or conception of progress. Without that distinction, “If not, then still” would amount to charging at a wall until either wall or forehead submits.
During another technical crisis, the team stops at a gas station, buys tape, tubing, and whatever else seems useful, then cobbles together an enclosure in the car. The contraption suggests that the partner’s speaker box, not Mayht’s technology alone, is causing the failure. It is hard not to like a hardware startup whose research program occasionally resembles a school project conducted during an evacuation. The scene also clarifies Scheek’s style. He writes much as the founders prototype: plainly, quickly, suspicious of elegance that cannot survive contact with the real problem. His prose is rarely beautiful in isolation. It is often exactly as elaborate as the work requires.
If there is a cost to that efficiency, it appears whenever uncertainty is processed like another engineering obstacle. Scheek often knows what an experience means almost as soon as he narrates it. Failure becomes resilience. Silence becomes a negotiation tool. Panic becomes narrative control. Delay becomes patience. The older narrator has earned the right to interpret his younger self, but success makes interpretation unusually tempting. Events that were contingent while occurring acquire clean causal edges afterward. The road to Sonos sometimes looks straighter in Scheek’s conclusions than in his anecdotes.
More than hindsight is involved, though. In January 2022, before the acquisition was public, Haje Jan Kamps wrote in TechCrunch about Mayht’s lean model: an engineering-heavy staff, patent-backed technology, a licensing strategy rather than giant-scale manufacturing, and advisers chosen partly for the doors they could open. That reporting supports the broad strategy Scheek now describes. He has not invented the plan backward from the sale. But it also makes something else plain. By then the company’s advantage existed not only inside the speaker but in technical proof, patents, credible people, commercial alternatives, and access.
Institutional help belongs in that mesh too. TU Delft records that Delft Enterprises invested early and remained involved through the sale. UNIIQ records a €300,000 proof-of-concept investment in Mayht in 2017. None of this cancels Scheek’s account of growing up without wealth or inherited access. It clarifies what the brothers learn next: how to present an invention in forms institutions can evaluate, fund, protect, and pass along. The family maxim prizes character over a silver spoon. The company story demonstrates that character can spend a remarkable amount of time acquiring introductions.
Turning invention into something another corporation can buy is where “100” becomes unusually good. The technical breakthrough is only the opening inconvenience. Mayht must patent without freezing development, reveal enough to earn trust without giving away too much, survive demonstrations, prove manufacturability, improve reliability, find money before the bank account empties, create competing options, and choose among licensing, financing, or acquisition. Between “this works” and “this is worth buying” sit tooling problems, acoustic measurements, lawyers, cash forecasts, burned weekends, and executives who can stop the process for reasons having little to do with sound.
Read Sonos’s later accounting against that story and the black socks look less comic. In its 2022 Form 10-K filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Sonos reported $99.3 million in cash consideration for Mayht and recognized $71.8 million in intangible assets related to in-process research and development. The figures show what sort of value Sonos believed it had purchased: technological possibility still awaiting full commercial expression. Mayht never needed to become a household speaker brand to become extraordinarily valuable. Its unfinishedness was part of the asset.
Once Sonos appears, the company confronts a problem no prototype can solve. A major shareholder with veto power does not want to sell. The objection is coherent: Mayht may become a unicorn, and another $20 million to $40 million could fund a much larger company. Scheek, Timothy, and Max calculate differently. More financing means dilution, another five or more years of work, and a bet that a favorable audio market will remain favorable. The disagreement becomes better, not worse, once neither side is foolish. Both can count. They disagree about what should be counted.
Pressed long enough, a rational disagreement can still become intolerable to the person living inside it. During a shareholder call in Stockholm on Gaia’s birthday, Mattias reaches the point where contractual power feels like ownership of his future labor. He leaves crying and tells Timothy and Max, “I’d rather be poor and happy than rich and depressed because I’m owned by these people.” The sentence lacks the polish of his business maxims. Good. The memoir has spent most of its pages converting scarcity into value; now its narrator reaches for poverty as preferable. Money has ceased to mean freedom because more of it would prolong a life he no longer wants.
Only four days after Timothy and Max make clear that the founders really may walk, the letter of intent is signed. Due diligence follows. The deal closes. Scheek’s pronouns then widen. Engineers, advisers, lawyers, finance teams, supportive shareholders, difficult shareholders: the victory belongs to a crowd. That widening matters because Mayht’s success has depended on learning whom to need. The shareholder who makes Mattias feel least free may also help produce a better sale price. Constraint and contribution occupy the same chair.
Under all of this sits a harsher question than valuation: how much future life does another round consume? Scheek’s father’s illness repeatedly interrupts the company’s clock. Later, adviser and shareholder Joakim dies. Near the end of 2021, Mattias, Timothy, and Max keep asking whether they still want an acquisition, and death changes the scale of the answer. Continue building for another five years toward a possibly larger outcome, or take a good exit while it exists? A philosophy of perseverance has reached the awkward point where continuing automatically may itself become a failure to choose.
Late in Chapter 12, the memoir seems to have completed its design. Sonos buys Mayht. Shareholders reconcile. Scheek returns to scarcity as a training ground, zero becoming one hundred, giving everything. The cash has arrived, the moral has been stated, the genre knows where the door is. Then comes an epilogue called “Forever Switched On.” Instead of adding afterglow, it opens the ending again.
One sentence does most of the damage: “It didn’t pass. It settled.” Scheek has assumed his post-acquisition restlessness is decompression after years of term sheets, prototypes, impossible pitches, and calls from the wrong time zone. “Pass” imagines weather, something moving through. “Settled” imagines residence. The two clipped sentences turn temporary aftershock into habitation before the paragraph finishes explaining anything. The startup may be over, but the startup-shaped nervous system has moved in.
Scheek goes further: “The goal was the form the hunger took.” For most of the memoir, Mayht appears to be the object around which desire organizes itself. Here the relation reverses. The hunger is primary; the company merely supplied it with a shape. He then refuses the darker diagnosis: “Not damaged. Not depleted. Just forever switched on.” The negatives matter because Scheek has anticipated the objection. He names injury and exhaustion, denies both, and chooses amplification.
Does the evidence obey him? Not quite. The previous chapters contain debt collectors, fractured sleep, long work sprints, grief spilling into business, business swallowing private time, and a breakdown at the edge of the transaction he has spent years pursuing. Scheek is entitled to prefer the self that emerged. What he cannot do is make the competing readings disappear. Vocation, adaptation, injury, exhilaration: the book has supplied material for all four. Its refusal to repent is far more interesting than a tidy conversion to leisure. One can be relieved that he does not end by discovering tomatoes.
Even with those reservations, I land at 86/100, translating to 4.50/5 on my Goodreads scale. “100” is unusually good at making hardware commercialization legible and dramatic, structurally alert enough to let later success complicate earlier lessons, and emotionally steadied by family material that prevents startup jeopardy from pretending to be the only kind. Its limits are equally visible: prose more functional than distinguished, a tendency to package experience before all its ambiguity has cooled, and a spectacular outcome that gives retrospective confidence to lessons less portable than their phrasing suggests.
Much later, after the patents, NDAs, financing acronyms, Vegas suites, shareholder calls, and acquisition arithmetic blur together, the book leaves behind a simple acoustic trick. Two brothers spend years proving that something physically small can produce a sound no one expects from it. Their company eventually does the same in the market, growing loud enough that corporations many times its size have to listen. Mattias is the final object to be amplified. Mayht can be signed away at a notary’s table. The appetite that built it cannot. Somewhere in that system, nobody installed a volume-down knob.
Mayht’s journey from homemade secrecy to a Sonos acquisition is funny, frantic, technically absorbing, and unexpectedly revealing about the patents, people, leverage, and dependencies required to make an improbable invention commercially real.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | October 16th, 2026
Duct tape would have been too dignified. Before one of Mayht’s early American trips, Mattias Scheek and his brother Timothy packed prototype speakers into numbered aluminum briefcases and hid the internals beneath covers sewn from large black socks. There is almost the whole company: valuable intellectual property under improvised hosiery, engineering ambition traveling with the seams exposed. “100: The Audio Startup That Turned the Volume All the Way Up” ends with Sonos buying Mayht for roughly $100 million, but the number matters less than the education that precedes it. The brothers discover that possessing something valuable and making somebody else value it on your terms are two different achievements.
Early in the memoir, Scheek gives that education a family history. He and Timothy grow up in Amsterdam in a family of Surinamese descent, with little spare money and memories of overt racism, but also with parents who refuse to let shortage define the household. Their father’s “If not, then still” becomes a family reflex. The brothers take speakers apart, rebuild them, sell elaborate custom designs, then leave that business when Timothy’s experiments point toward a compact architecture capable of producing far more sound than its size should permit. Scheek names the lesson early: scarcity can train invention. Because it comes from childhood rather than a management seminar, it has weight.
Mayht soon discovers how many things ingenuity cannot pay for. Patent searches cost money. Prototypes need components. Investors ask for due diligence. Manufacturers want technical information the founders would rather keep covered by those black socks. Engineers need salaries. Corporate executives demand demonstrations Mayht cannot choreograph. Financing buys time, but time immediately acquires a burn rate. Outside expertise fills gaps, then introduces processes slower than the founders’ build-test-break rhythm. Attention from large companies creates possibilities and new demands for proof. Scarcity never leaves the room. It changes clothes.
Even the three-part design refuses the soothing fiction that progress makes things simpler. “Building the Foundation” becomes “Survival Mode,” then “The Acquisition,” but the ugliest fight arrives after Sonos has made the offer the founders spent years trying to deserve. Chapter titles such as “Excitement Versus Need,” “How Having More Demands More,” and “Big Break Versus Breaking Point” tell us what the chronology keeps demonstrating: every solution invents a more sophisticated problem. A little company can survive on improvisation. A valuable company has shareholders.
The brothers therefore acquire power in an odd way: by acquiring people they need. Delft-linked institutions help turn an invention into an investable entity. Max van den Berg brings corporate access. Lawyers make patents and contracts defensible. Engineers convert prototypes into repeatable technology. Advisers supply knowledge and introductions. Later investors give Mayht alternatives to earlier investors. Eventually competing corporate interest gives the founders bargaining power. They become more powerful by needing more people. The price is that many of those people now have a legitimate reason to care about what happens next.
Relationships rescue them too often for a cynical reading to survive. Max gets meetings the brothers cannot. Advisers know which questions they have not learned to ask. Outside money lets Mayht survive long enough for the technology to mature. When Exeger and Martin Garrix join the cap table, the new money reduces dependence on the largest existing shareholder. Even that shareholder, later the chief obstacle to the Sonos sale, is credited with helping force a higher price. The plot keeps distributing causality among more people, even while some closing rhetoric prefers the cleaner language of character and persistence.
In one of the most useful failures, Mayht enters a demonstration believing it knows how to make its invention persuasive. Then the variables disappear from its control one by one. A prospective partner places the speaker in the center of the room, where it loses helpful acoustic reinforcement. The partner chooses the music. Its engineers run the measurements. Someone drives the prototype beyond its capacity. The sound distorts. No prototype bursts into flame; the embarrassment is worse for being technically mundane. The founders have spent years learning how to stage proof, and now somebody else owns the stage.
Precisely after that demonstration, the book cuts to a section called “Running Out of Runway.” Startup readers know the phrase: cash divided by monthly burn, a clock disguised as arithmetic. Scheek then tells us his father’s cancer has metastasized and the doctors cannot save him. During a family trip that may be a farewell, his father announces during a card game that he will do ten push-ups. He reaches ten and continues to twenty. A startup may run out of runway; a body does too. Suddenly “If not, then still” is no startup slogan. It is a man on the floor counting past ten when counting will not alter his diagnosis.
After scenes like that, one sees why Scheek’s instructional habit works and why it can work too hard. His sentences are mostly short or medium-length, clear without becoming skeletal, and comfortable with venture finance, patents, acoustics, and corporate development. Jargon usually arrives attached to a consequence. He also lets his younger self look ridiculous. He remembers judging accomplished people by their cars and recounts sending his lawyer an email warning that a prospective partner might steal Mayht’s technology, then noticing that the prospective partner was copied on it. Parentheses often act as a second, less ceremonial narrator, slipping in embarrassment before the successful founder can look too prophetic.
Particularly characteristic is the speed with which embarrassment becomes method. When Mayht is almost out of money, the founders persuade an investor to make an early payment by describing the problem as preserving momentum rather than averting collapse. Scheek draws the rule himself: “When you have no leverage, controlling the narrative becomes your leverage.” It is a sharp description of that negotiation, and also where memoir shades into business-book doctrine. A sentence can change another person’s understanding of your predicament. It cannot indefinitely change the predicament. “100” does not always police the difference between an earned lesson and a portable law.
And some of its own scenes quietly rebel. By mid-2020, an ambitious new speaker architecture still refuses to behave. After months of frustration, Mattias and Timothy test an idea they almost regard as capitulation: remove one sophisticated new component and reinstall an older design from 2018. The backward move works. That is a better account of persistence than several aphorisms around it. The founders preserve the objective, not every method or conception of progress. Without that distinction, “If not, then still” would amount to charging at a wall until either wall or forehead submits.
During another technical crisis, the team stops at a gas station, buys tape, tubing, and whatever else seems useful, then cobbles together an enclosure in the car. The contraption suggests that the partner’s speaker box, not Mayht’s technology alone, is causing the failure. It is hard not to like a hardware startup whose research program occasionally resembles a school project conducted during an evacuation. The scene also clarifies Scheek’s style. He writes much as the founders prototype: plainly, quickly, suspicious of elegance that cannot survive contact with the real problem. His prose is rarely beautiful in isolation. It is often exactly as elaborate as the work requires.
If there is a cost to that efficiency, it appears whenever uncertainty is processed like another engineering obstacle. Scheek often knows what an experience means almost as soon as he narrates it. Failure becomes resilience. Silence becomes a negotiation tool. Panic becomes narrative control. Delay becomes patience. The older narrator has earned the right to interpret his younger self, but success makes interpretation unusually tempting. Events that were contingent while occurring acquire clean causal edges afterward. The road to Sonos sometimes looks straighter in Scheek’s conclusions than in his anecdotes.
More than hindsight is involved, though. In January 2022, before the acquisition was public, Haje Jan Kamps wrote in TechCrunch about Mayht’s lean model: an engineering-heavy staff, patent-backed technology, a licensing strategy rather than giant-scale manufacturing, and advisers chosen partly for the doors they could open. That reporting supports the broad strategy Scheek now describes. He has not invented the plan backward from the sale. But it also makes something else plain. By then the company’s advantage existed not only inside the speaker but in technical proof, patents, credible people, commercial alternatives, and access.
Institutional help belongs in that mesh too. TU Delft records that Delft Enterprises invested early and remained involved through the sale. UNIIQ records a €300,000 proof-of-concept investment in Mayht in 2017. None of this cancels Scheek’s account of growing up without wealth or inherited access. It clarifies what the brothers learn next: how to present an invention in forms institutions can evaluate, fund, protect, and pass along. The family maxim prizes character over a silver spoon. The company story demonstrates that character can spend a remarkable amount of time acquiring introductions.
Turning invention into something another corporation can buy is where “100” becomes unusually good. The technical breakthrough is only the opening inconvenience. Mayht must patent without freezing development, reveal enough to earn trust without giving away too much, survive demonstrations, prove manufacturability, improve reliability, find money before the bank account empties, create competing options, and choose among licensing, financing, or acquisition. Between “this works” and “this is worth buying” sit tooling problems, acoustic measurements, lawyers, cash forecasts, burned weekends, and executives who can stop the process for reasons having little to do with sound.
Read Sonos’s later accounting against that story and the black socks look less comic. In its 2022 Form 10-K filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Sonos reported $99.3 million in cash consideration for Mayht and recognized $71.8 million in intangible assets related to in-process research and development. The figures show what sort of value Sonos believed it had purchased: technological possibility still awaiting full commercial expression. Mayht never needed to become a household speaker brand to become extraordinarily valuable. Its unfinishedness was part of the asset.
Once Sonos appears, the company confronts a problem no prototype can solve. A major shareholder with veto power does not want to sell. The objection is coherent: Mayht may become a unicorn, and another $20 million to $40 million could fund a much larger company. Scheek, Timothy, and Max calculate differently. More financing means dilution, another five or more years of work, and a bet that a favorable audio market will remain favorable. The disagreement becomes better, not worse, once neither side is foolish. Both can count. They disagree about what should be counted.
Pressed long enough, a rational disagreement can still become intolerable to the person living inside it. During a shareholder call in Stockholm on Gaia’s birthday, Mattias reaches the point where contractual power feels like ownership of his future labor. He leaves crying and tells Timothy and Max, “I’d rather be poor and happy than rich and depressed because I’m owned by these people.” The sentence lacks the polish of his business maxims. Good. The memoir has spent most of its pages converting scarcity into value; now its narrator reaches for poverty as preferable. Money has ceased to mean freedom because more of it would prolong a life he no longer wants.
Only four days after Timothy and Max make clear that the founders really may walk, the letter of intent is signed. Due diligence follows. The deal closes. Scheek’s pronouns then widen. Engineers, advisers, lawyers, finance teams, supportive shareholders, difficult shareholders: the victory belongs to a crowd. That widening matters because Mayht’s success has depended on learning whom to need. The shareholder who makes Mattias feel least free may also help produce a better sale price. Constraint and contribution occupy the same chair.
Under all of this sits a harsher question than valuation: how much future life does another round consume? Scheek’s father’s illness repeatedly interrupts the company’s clock. Later, adviser and shareholder Joakim dies. Near the end of 2021, Mattias, Timothy, and Max keep asking whether they still want an acquisition, and death changes the scale of the answer. Continue building for another five years toward a possibly larger outcome, or take a good exit while it exists? A philosophy of perseverance has reached the awkward point where continuing automatically may itself become a failure to choose.
Late in Chapter 12, the memoir seems to have completed its design. Sonos buys Mayht. Shareholders reconcile. Scheek returns to scarcity as a training ground, zero becoming one hundred, giving everything. The cash has arrived, the moral has been stated, the genre knows where the door is. Then comes an epilogue called “Forever Switched On.” Instead of adding afterglow, it opens the ending again.
One sentence does most of the damage: “It didn’t pass. It settled.” Scheek has assumed his post-acquisition restlessness is decompression after years of term sheets, prototypes, impossible pitches, and calls from the wrong time zone. “Pass” imagines weather, something moving through. “Settled” imagines residence. The two clipped sentences turn temporary aftershock into habitation before the paragraph finishes explaining anything. The startup may be over, but the startup-shaped nervous system has moved in.
Scheek goes further: “The goal was the form the hunger took.” For most of the memoir, Mayht appears to be the object around which desire organizes itself. Here the relation reverses. The hunger is primary; the company merely supplied it with a shape. He then refuses the darker diagnosis: “Not damaged. Not depleted. Just forever switched on.” The negatives matter because Scheek has anticipated the objection. He names injury and exhaustion, denies both, and chooses amplification.
Does the evidence obey him? Not quite. The previous chapters contain debt collectors, fractured sleep, long work sprints, grief spilling into business, business swallowing private time, and a breakdown at the edge of the transaction he has spent years pursuing. Scheek is entitled to prefer the self that emerged. What he cannot do is make the competing readings disappear. Vocation, adaptation, injury, exhilaration: the book has supplied material for all four. Its refusal to repent is far more interesting than a tidy conversion to leisure. One can be relieved that he does not end by discovering tomatoes.
Even with those reservations, I land at 86/100, translating to 4.50/5 on my Goodreads scale. “100” is unusually good at making hardware commercialization legible and dramatic, structurally alert enough to let later success complicate earlier lessons, and emotionally steadied by family material that prevents startup jeopardy from pretending to be the only kind. Its limits are equally visible: prose more functional than distinguished, a tendency to package experience before all its ambiguity has cooled, and a spectacular outcome that gives retrospective confidence to lessons less portable than their phrasing suggests.
Much later, after the patents, NDAs, financing acronyms, Vegas suites, shareholder calls, and acquisition arithmetic blur together, the book leaves behind a simple acoustic trick. Two brothers spend years proving that something physically small can produce a sound no one expects from it. Their company eventually does the same in the market, growing loud enough that corporations many times its size have to listen. Mattias is the final object to be amplified. Mayht can be signed away at a notary’s table. The appetite that built it cannot. Somewhere in that system, nobody installed a volume-down knob.
Review of advance copy received from Goodreads Giveaways
This book was okay. Everything felt very broad with barebones descriptions.
A lot of we met with a company in this country. Then we met with a company in this State and we were in US, so we went to this State also and met with a company. At a certain point it hit me that NDAs were probably the reason for not naming names of people or companies.
Another thing the book needed was images. We have a description of using a meeting as a staging opportunity to take pictures, but we never see the pictures. We never get to see early prototypes, mockups, diagrams, CAD drawings, or anything really. Just vague text about how they made it flatter or condensed this or 3D printed that. I wanted comparison shots of the SONOS Five and any of their prototypes that their speaker kept getting compared to in nearly every meeting.
Like I said, it is okay. They spent a decade pursing a passion and the book has some good tips in there. Just I felt like it needed more.
#GoodReadsGiveAway
A lot of we met with a company in this country. Then we met with a company in this State and we were in US, so we went to this State also and met with a company. At a certain point it hit me that NDAs were probably the reason for not naming names of people or companies.
Another thing the book needed was images. We have a description of using a meeting as a staging opportunity to take pictures, but we never see the pictures. We never get to see early prototypes, mockups, diagrams, CAD drawings, or anything really. Just vague text about how they made it flatter or condensed this or 3D printed that. I wanted comparison shots of the SONOS Five and any of their prototypes that their speaker kept getting compared to in nearly every meeting.
Like I said, it is okay. They spent a decade pursing a passion and the book has some good tips in there. Just I felt like it needed more.
#GoodReadsGiveAway
Review of advance copy received from Goodreads Giveaways
Turning It Up to 100: A Review of 100: The Audio
Startup That Turned the Volume All the Way Up by
Mattias Scheek
Posted on Prairie Fox Reads https://prairiefoxreads.blogspot.com/...
Advanced Review Copy provided by the publisher
Book Details:
Title: 100: The Audio Startup That Turned the Volume All the Way Up
Author: Mattias Scheek
Publisher: SXSW Books (Expected Publication October 27, 2026)
Format: Kindle Edition, 169 pages
Genres: Business, Entrepreneurship, Startups, Technology, Memoir
Startup success stories are often told backward.
We hear about the acquisition.
The valuation.
The breakthrough product.
The headline-making exit.
What tends to disappear from the narrative are the years of uncertainty that came before. The failed prototypes. The financial stress. The investor meetings that went nowhere. The moments when quitting would have been the rational choice.
Mattias Scheek's 100 succeeds because it spends most of its time in those uncomfortable spaces.
Rather than presenting entrepreneurship as a glamorous journey toward a $100 million acquisition, Scheek offers a firsthand account of what it was like to build Mayht from an ambitious idea into a company whose audio technology ultimately attracted the attention of Sonos. The result is equal parts startup memoir and practical business guide, filled with lessons learned the hard way.
For readers who enjoy books about innovation, perseverance, and product development, 100 delivers a refreshingly grounded perspective.
Innovation Begins in Ordinary Places
One of the book's most appealing themes is that transformative ideas do not always emerge from venture capital firms, elite universities, or Silicon Valley incubators.
Scheek and his brother began where many inventors do: experimenting.
Building.
Testing.
Failing.
Trying again.
Growing up in Amsterdam, they spent years assembling speakers from secondhand components, driven more by curiosity than by any expectation of becoming technology entrepreneurs.
As someone who enjoys books about systems, engineering, and problem-solving, I found these early chapters particularly engaging. They remind readers that innovation often begins not with resources but with fascination.
The most successful entrepreneurs frequently start as people obsessed with solving a problem.
The business comes later.
The Reality of Startup Life
One of the book's greatest strengths is its honesty regarding the realities of entrepreneurship.
Many startup memoirs inadvertently become victory laps.
100 generally avoids this trap.
Scheek openly discusses setbacks, uncertainty, investor dynamics, and the emotional toll of trying to build something new. Readers encounter long nights, difficult decisions, and periods when progress appears frustratingly slow.
The book repeatedly demonstrates that entrepreneurship is less about dramatic breakthroughs than persistent problem-solving.
This perspective makes the story feel credible.
Success arrives not because the founders possessed superhuman confidence, but because they continued moving forward despite repeated obstacles.
Resource Constraints as an Advantage
A recurring lesson throughout the book is the idea that limitations can become strengths.
Without abundant resources, startups are often forced to develop creative solutions that larger organizations might overlook. Scheek argues that scarcity can sharpen thinking and encourage innovation rather than simply restricting it.
I appreciated this point because it aligns with many real-world examples of technological advancement.
Constraints often drive creativity.
When unlimited options aren't available, teams must focus on what matters most.
The lessons here extend beyond startup culture and apply to organizations, projects, and even personal challenges.
Negotiation, Patience, and Timing
Readers expecting a purely technical story may be surprised by how much of the book deals with relationships.
Investors.
Partners.
Customers.
Potential acquirers.
Industry leaders.
Scheek repeatedly demonstrates that building a company depends as much on navigating people as developing products.
Some of the book's strongest insights involve negotiation and timing. Knowing when to compromise, when to hold firm, and when to walk away becomes as important as technical expertise.
This human dimension gives the book broader relevance for readers who may never launch a startup themselves.
Technology Without the Jargon
Another strength of 100 is its accessibility.
The book revolves around audio technology and engineering innovation, yet Scheek generally avoids overwhelming readers with technical detail. Enough information is provided to understand the significance of the company's breakthrough without requiring an engineering degree.
This balance helps maintain narrative momentum.
The story remains focused on people solving problems rather than becoming bogged down in specifications and technical explanations.
Readers interested in entrepreneurship will likely appreciate this approach.
Brevity Works in Its Favor
At under 200 pages, 100 is notably shorter than many startup memoirs.
In this case, that brevity works to the book's advantage.
Scheek focuses on the essentials, avoiding unnecessary detours or inflated storytelling. The narrative remains tightly centered on building the company, navigating challenges, and ultimately reaching acquisition.
Some readers may wish for deeper exploration of certain moments, particularly the acquisition process itself. However, the concise format ensures the book never overstays its welcome.
Final Verdict
100: The Audio Startup That Turned the Volume All the Way Up is an engaging and practical look at entrepreneurship from someone who has actually lived it. Mattias Scheek provides a candid account of innovation, product development, fundraising, and acquisition without falling into the trap of portraying startup success as inevitable.
The book's greatest strength lies in its authenticity. Rather than presenting a neatly polished success narrative, Scheek acknowledges the uncertainty and persistence required to transform an unlikely idea into a company worth acquiring.
Entrepreneurs, engineers, innovators, and readers interested in startup culture will find plenty of valuable insights here. Even those with little interest in audio technology may appreciate the broader lessons about resilience, problem-solving, and the realities of building something from nothing.
Prairiefox Rating: 🦊🦊🦊🦊 / 5 Foxes
A concise and engaging startup memoir that cuts through entrepreneurial mythology to reveal the persistence, creativity, and grit behind a remarkable technology success story. Practical, honest, and highly readable. 🔊🚀
Startup That Turned the Volume All the Way Up by
Mattias Scheek
Posted on Prairie Fox Reads https://prairiefoxreads.blogspot.com/...
Advanced Review Copy provided by the publisher
Book Details:
Title: 100: The Audio Startup That Turned the Volume All the Way Up
Author: Mattias Scheek
Publisher: SXSW Books (Expected Publication October 27, 2026)
Format: Kindle Edition, 169 pages
Genres: Business, Entrepreneurship, Startups, Technology, Memoir
Startup success stories are often told backward.
We hear about the acquisition.
The valuation.
The breakthrough product.
The headline-making exit.
What tends to disappear from the narrative are the years of uncertainty that came before. The failed prototypes. The financial stress. The investor meetings that went nowhere. The moments when quitting would have been the rational choice.
Mattias Scheek's 100 succeeds because it spends most of its time in those uncomfortable spaces.
Rather than presenting entrepreneurship as a glamorous journey toward a $100 million acquisition, Scheek offers a firsthand account of what it was like to build Mayht from an ambitious idea into a company whose audio technology ultimately attracted the attention of Sonos. The result is equal parts startup memoir and practical business guide, filled with lessons learned the hard way.
For readers who enjoy books about innovation, perseverance, and product development, 100 delivers a refreshingly grounded perspective.
Innovation Begins in Ordinary Places
One of the book's most appealing themes is that transformative ideas do not always emerge from venture capital firms, elite universities, or Silicon Valley incubators.
Scheek and his brother began where many inventors do: experimenting.
Building.
Testing.
Failing.
Trying again.
Growing up in Amsterdam, they spent years assembling speakers from secondhand components, driven more by curiosity than by any expectation of becoming technology entrepreneurs.
As someone who enjoys books about systems, engineering, and problem-solving, I found these early chapters particularly engaging. They remind readers that innovation often begins not with resources but with fascination.
The most successful entrepreneurs frequently start as people obsessed with solving a problem.
The business comes later.
The Reality of Startup Life
One of the book's greatest strengths is its honesty regarding the realities of entrepreneurship.
Many startup memoirs inadvertently become victory laps.
100 generally avoids this trap.
Scheek openly discusses setbacks, uncertainty, investor dynamics, and the emotional toll of trying to build something new. Readers encounter long nights, difficult decisions, and periods when progress appears frustratingly slow.
The book repeatedly demonstrates that entrepreneurship is less about dramatic breakthroughs than persistent problem-solving.
This perspective makes the story feel credible.
Success arrives not because the founders possessed superhuman confidence, but because they continued moving forward despite repeated obstacles.
Resource Constraints as an Advantage
A recurring lesson throughout the book is the idea that limitations can become strengths.
Without abundant resources, startups are often forced to develop creative solutions that larger organizations might overlook. Scheek argues that scarcity can sharpen thinking and encourage innovation rather than simply restricting it.
I appreciated this point because it aligns with many real-world examples of technological advancement.
Constraints often drive creativity.
When unlimited options aren't available, teams must focus on what matters most.
The lessons here extend beyond startup culture and apply to organizations, projects, and even personal challenges.
Negotiation, Patience, and Timing
Readers expecting a purely technical story may be surprised by how much of the book deals with relationships.
Investors.
Partners.
Customers.
Potential acquirers.
Industry leaders.
Scheek repeatedly demonstrates that building a company depends as much on navigating people as developing products.
Some of the book's strongest insights involve negotiation and timing. Knowing when to compromise, when to hold firm, and when to walk away becomes as important as technical expertise.
This human dimension gives the book broader relevance for readers who may never launch a startup themselves.
Technology Without the Jargon
Another strength of 100 is its accessibility.
The book revolves around audio technology and engineering innovation, yet Scheek generally avoids overwhelming readers with technical detail. Enough information is provided to understand the significance of the company's breakthrough without requiring an engineering degree.
This balance helps maintain narrative momentum.
The story remains focused on people solving problems rather than becoming bogged down in specifications and technical explanations.
Readers interested in entrepreneurship will likely appreciate this approach.
Brevity Works in Its Favor
At under 200 pages, 100 is notably shorter than many startup memoirs.
In this case, that brevity works to the book's advantage.
Scheek focuses on the essentials, avoiding unnecessary detours or inflated storytelling. The narrative remains tightly centered on building the company, navigating challenges, and ultimately reaching acquisition.
Some readers may wish for deeper exploration of certain moments, particularly the acquisition process itself. However, the concise format ensures the book never overstays its welcome.
Final Verdict
100: The Audio Startup That Turned the Volume All the Way Up is an engaging and practical look at entrepreneurship from someone who has actually lived it. Mattias Scheek provides a candid account of innovation, product development, fundraising, and acquisition without falling into the trap of portraying startup success as inevitable.
The book's greatest strength lies in its authenticity. Rather than presenting a neatly polished success narrative, Scheek acknowledges the uncertainty and persistence required to transform an unlikely idea into a company worth acquiring.
Entrepreneurs, engineers, innovators, and readers interested in startup culture will find plenty of valuable insights here. Even those with little interest in audio technology may appreciate the broader lessons about resilience, problem-solving, and the realities of building something from nothing.
Prairiefox Rating: 🦊🦊🦊🦊 / 5 Foxes
A concise and engaging startup memoir that cuts through entrepreneurial mythology to reveal the persistence, creativity, and grit behind a remarkable technology success story. Practical, honest, and highly readable. 🔊🚀
September 4, 2026
Such a good read.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews