We recently connected with Andrew Zhao and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Andrew thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.
Everyone knows that startup founders wear a lot of hats. For me, that couldn’t be more true. I mean literally, I have baseball caps, beanies, hats, and more. But also, I wear a lot of hats in the figurative sense. I’m simultaneously an artist, entrepreneur, and engineer. Playing so many different positions at the same time has required me to take practice and learning very seriously. More importantly than any specific thing I’ve learned- is that I’ve learned how to learn.
In late 2019 I was killing it at my professional sales job. I was a young star on the rise, having finally broken through the quota that put me in the top 10% of the company making multiple six-figures. All of a sudden, I was faced with a fork in the road. A mysterious angel investor sent me an email asking me “Have you ever thought about quitting your job and working on your startup, Throwlights, full-time?” I knew that if I chose to go down that route, I’d be faced with a ton of uncertainty and hardship. But- I also knew that if I didn’t accept the offer, I’d regret it the rest of my life. I swallowed hard and took the risky leap. I quit my job and went to work on Throwlights.
Over the last two and a half years I’ve been on an accelerated learning journey – at times a euphoric joyride, and at times a crash course.
The lessons I’ve learned as both an artist and entrepreneur have been countless. As an artist, we are constantly honing our skills while at the same time chasing the elusive muse and trying to perceive our own work from the audience’s perspective. Being an entrepreneur is like playing 4-dimensional chess. You’re constantly balancing high level strategy with ground-level tactics and trying to pull invisible strings together.
My favorite learning journey so far has been as an engineer though. In late 2021 after a series of suboptimal experiences with contract engineers, I found that it was essential to take product building into my own hands. I didn’t have the time to go back to school, so I looked for ways that I could learn the skills I needed online, on my own. What I found was a vast treasure trove of knowledge in the form of MOOCs (massive open online courses). Sites like EdX.org provided me a way to learn the same materials that students from top universities, like Darthmouth, Harvard, and MIT, learn, from my own home, and even provide professional certifications for a small fee. Diving into these MOOCs opened up an intense thirst for knowledge within me and ever since then I’ve been soaking in a deluge of learning material.
Learning how to learn means coming to the realization that knowledge is the most powerful thing in the world. Studying, intensively, is so important because it reduces the amount that you have to learn from your own failures. Other people have walked in your shoes (or similar ones) before and you can absorb their learnings and mistakes so that you don’t have to go through them yourself. No matter what hat you wear, make sure you take the time and dedication to learn. Figure out what resources are available – there are a lot online. Learn seriously and learn continuously. Dive in with energy and vigor and make it one of the most important things you do.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
In 2009, one of my best friends was back from college on break and called me excitedly with, “There’s something I have got to show you!”
He came over to my home and proceeded to pull out all kinds of colorful, strobing, LED “rave” lights and started doing cool tricks with them, like “conjuring” and “finger rolls.”
At the time I had never seen anything like that, and I was instantly captivated. My favorite was the white gloves with an LED strobe in each finger tip. I started picking up this thing called “gloving” shortly thereafter.
Over the last more than a decade, I’ve seen gloving grow from an obscure rave art into an intricate, emerging artform with a real culture, skillset, and technological products behind it. From the very early days I’ve always believed that a huge future lay ahead for gloving. The future I envision is that gloving will be the next multi-billion dollar e-sport and tech-enabled artform.
I went full-time with my startup, Throwlights, in 2019, to create this vision and build the next-generation products for lightshow artists. Throwlights has achieved a lot in a short period of time. I’ve assembled a star team comprised of myself and my two VP’s, Jakeb Livengood, and Jocelyn Ragukonis. We released the smallest and most ergonomic gloving light ever created (by a form factor of 20%), that’s gotten rave reviews from some of the world’s leading gloving artists. And we’re still only getting started. This year we’re planning on building products that innovate this space to an entirely new level and distributing them all over the world. We’re also pushing the boundaries of how the content is owned and viewed – on social media, the blockchain, and in the metaverse.
Alongside Throwlights, I’m very proud of how far I’ve come as a lightshow artist. My goal is to become a legend – one of the best that ever lived! I think I’m making good progress, but as art is subjective, I’ll let the competition record tell the story – I’m currently undefeated in 1-on-1 competitions and in 2020 I placed Top 8 at a statewide event.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)
We’re currently in the middle of a digital renaissance. New technological mediums are enabling artists to create with virtually unlimited boundaries. Music is created in digital audio workstations, art is being created in graphics editors in 2D and 3D, video content is allowing individual creators to become superstars from their own bedrooms, etc… All this content can now be tokenized and transferred on the blockchain and engineered with smart contracts to allow creators all new creative abilities to license, distribute, and gamify their artistic creations. When we’re talking about art, this is still only one use case for NFT’s. The possibilities are absolutely limitless within “Web3.” NFT’s are 100%, without a shadow of a doubt, the future, and the coming years will tell that story.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
There are still so many deep, unresolved mysteries of our universe that scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers have grappled with for millenia. Artists surpass all of this conjecture and simply create symbolic artifacts that are imbued with all the meaning that defies expression. In a way, we abstract all the things that don’t need to be or can’t be said, but simply perceived and felt.
Contact Info:
- Website: throwlights.com
- Instagram: @throwlights
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewjzhao/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/wildr0gue
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/throwlightsinc
- Other: discord.gg/throwlights
Image Credits
Jonas Yuan