View from the Top: Darren Nakonechny, Founder/CEO, Flock Audio

Dallas, TX (November 24, 2025)—After working as a touring musician for 10 years, Darren Nakonechny traded the road for an uninspiring stint in corporate middle-management and running his own studio on the side. When the studio took off, he gladly waved goodbye to the corporate world, but the experience he gained managing others came in handy soon after when he created PATCH and wound up with a new company almost as a byproduct.

It sounds like the plot of an old-fashioned Hollywood movie: A small business owner looks for a product to solve a problem but can’t find it, so he creates it himself, working in his garage, and suddenly the world beats a path to his door. That’s essentially what happened for Nakonechny: “I needed a patch bay, but I hated them and found them archaic; I was looking for a product like PATCH and realized that it didn’t exist. I got referred to a patent attorney, I connected with a team of engineers, put it together, and over the course of a year, we brought the first PATCH to market. It was a big success…and as we got feedback from the industry, we scaled up the product line and the company from there.”

While Nakonechny originally chose his studio over the corporate world, soon that dilemma returned—both the company and facility were named Flock Audio, and this time his company won. What began in a two-car garage soon moved to a warehouse in Kolowna, British Columbia, for five years, before relocating to the U.S. in 2024. “We’re now based in Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, in a 5,000-square-foot space that gives us ample room to continue to grow,” he reports.

These days, the company has a staff of 12, mostly based in Texas but with a few remote employees still in Canada. Nakonechny’s miserable time in middle-management has informed how he leads the culture of his own company today. “A lot of [our] ‘people-first’ approach goes back to when I worked in the corporate world and saw how mismanagement of people contributed negatively to outcomes,” he says. “As much as I foster a very different environment, I appreciate that I had to live through that because I had to think about how I’d run my own company. Showing appreciation to the staff is super-important and guarantees that we’ll all be able to do our best work.”

Much of that work has been the continual development of Flock’s flagship product. “After the first PATCH was released, there were immediately calls for more features, larger I/O counts and so on, so it was a no-brainer for us to design and build larger ones. PATCH APP DX similarly developed from a combination of our own concepts and collaborating with our users to design a more premium experience. There is still a strong innovation and problem-solving streak within the company that governs most of our decisions, potential feature sets, product lines and more, but that connection with the user base is very strong.”

As might be expected, the user base mostly comprises recording studios, but the company has found its PATCH products are making inroads into live sound and streaming applications, too. Acknowledging “the unexpected versatility of our products,” Nakonechny adds there’s been “some quite compelling special projects outside of pro audio, including some contracts with the U.S. government.”

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While Nakonechny sees the company’s sales strengthening here and abroad, Flock Audio’s move to the U.S. has helped it connect with the country’s pro audio community—both users and manufacturers. “We have much more ready access to potential partners in the industry, and it’s a wealth of knowledge, experience and ingenuity that we’re excited to explore,” he says. “[Also,] a rewarding part of building Flock’s user base has been how many students and educators have embraced what we do, and it’s very humbling to have the opportunity to encourage the next generation of audio engineers and product designers. Now that we’re based in the U.S., this is going to become a more overt part of our operations, and we’re very excited to explore where that takes us.”