PK Sound has appointed Conrad Whelan, to its board of directors to assist in fundraising efforts and ‘to serve as a visionary for its innovative product line’.
Whelan brings his technical expertise and an extensive professional network to the company’s executive leadership team. In addition to helping with current fundraising efforts, he is already looking toward the tech side of live sound and asking how to make loudspeakers ‘smarter’. As an example of the ‘smarter’ approach, the Trinity robotic line array features PK Sound’s 3D Wavefront Control technology, letting engineers steer and focus sound.
‘Trinity is a pretty epic innovation, especially because, the thing about electronic music is, it’s loudly amplified, and it’s being played more and more,’ he says, ‘Especially in places like America, electronic music culture is coming to more outdoor shows, and more festivals. And the fact that Trinity has a tunable soundfield makes it much easier to place more festivals in more densely populated areas, because you can tune the field of sound so that you’re not disturbing neighbouring areas.’
Whelan said it was his love of live music that first brought him to PK Sound. Working as a DJ in 2004, he volunteered to do the sound engineering at one of the stages for Shambhala Music Festival, a four-day electronic dance music festival in Salmo, British Columbia. Here, he met PK Sound President and CEO, Jeremy Bridge. ‘I loved the fact that these guys were from Calgary, my hometown, and they were building speakers,’ Whelan recalls.
Having established a relationship with PK Sound’s leadership team, Whelan moved to San Francisco in 2010 to join Camp’s newest venture, then UberCab, which Camp co-founded in the wake of his earlier success with web-discovery platform StumbleUpon. In 2016, Whelan left Uber and began building an entrepreneurial investment portfolio. First, he turned toward his love of the arts and helped with fundraising for Hodgee Films Inc, a Vancouver, British Columbia, film company focusing on music, travel and pop culture-based documentaries. With his appointment at PK Sound, he is looking forward to learning, ‘as a board member, what it takes to run a company like this’. And, while he suspects his role will evolve with the company, Whelan has already started making calls on behalf of PK Sound, helping with fundraising efforts and using his network to reach out to potential investors.
‘Whether it’s at festivals or clubs, PK Sound is like the gold standard,’ Whelan says. ‘These guys are making speakers that can modify how they’re passing sound through the air, and it’s modifiable through software.
‘I think software is eating the world, so it just makes sense that somebody is doing that, and PK Sound is on the cusp.’
More: www.pksound.ca
