Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Tolga Onuk. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Tolga thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Parents can play a significant role in affecting how our lives and careers turn out – and so we think it’s important to look back and have conversations about what our parents did that affected us positive (or negatively) so that we can learn from the billions of experiences in each generation. What’s something you feel your parents did right that impacted you positively.

Great first question.

First of all I must say I am pretty lucky that I have highly technical parents. My father is an engineer with over 40 years of experience in large scale construction engineering, he helped building countless high scale projects both in Turkiye and in Middle East over many decades. From large hospital campuses in Libya, to airports in Afghanistan, and embassy buildings (fortresses) in Iraq, he undertook both highly risky and hard to complete projects in his career.

My mother retired from the Turkish Navy’s NATO intelligence division, she is a mathematician and a programmer with decades of experience. She spent her entire career working 4 floors underneath a military establishment.

Not only they were both mentally tough intellectuals, but they also raised me and my brother with the same discipline and culture. They did argue here and there when we were growing up like it happens many relationships, but we never had serious problems as a family. We were a family of love, intelligence and hard-work altogether.

And finally, we studied in the best private schools in Turkiye. TED Ankara College PHS and Başkent University are top educational institutions in Turkiye. Both I and my brother played (American) football in college and that was the primary reason how I ended up in Southern California.

I came to the USA to play football and study interactive design at Palomar College. 7-8 Years later my brother also came to Southern California after I settled here in LA and started my own Interactive Studio “Thunderbolt” in Beverly Hills, CA. When I was working on 7-figure deals for my company, he was getting his engineering masters from USC.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

After playing some college football at Palomar College, I moved to Los Angeles in 2007 to be a part of a newly founded gaming studio in Santa Monica. Spin Master Studios was growing with the help of its parent company which was the largest Kid’s entertainment company based in Canada.

In my first job experience in the US, I had a chance to work side by side with the greatest talent. My colleagues at Spin Master Studios were a Game Design Director from Sony, and my supervisor was an Executive Producer from EA. All of our team members were rock star players from top interactive and gaming studios in California. So I had a great chance of learning from them, and also I’ve seen how a small studio of 9-10 people grew into a 80 people powerhouse in less than 3 years.

I did amazing work for Spin Master for 4 years, I co-designed online interactive games, and many brand websites. Then I became a director at a newly established mobile gaming agency based in Venice. Shortly after I was the director of product at one of the top LA interactive agencies, HYFN. I managed the design processes of countless projects, while working with multiple engineering teams simultaneously. HYFN was the place I discovered that I could establish my own studio because I contributed immensely into both business development pitches and overall conception & completion of projects in 2012. 360 degrees, from sales to design, marketing and development, my work was shining at all processes of the digital product development.

After HYFN, I worked at Electronic Arts as a contractor (EA) where I led a team of producers, designers and copywriters to better promote all of EA Mobile Games – I was the Global Design Lead for User Acquisitions. After gaining significant experience and credentials at EA, I also accumulated enough funds to start my own ventures.

This is when I co-founded Curbstand, the first mobile payments solution for Valet Operations. As one of its kind SaaS project started in 2013, Curbstand aimed to digitalize cash payments for Valet booths which is a $2B industry nationwide. Cubstand raised $6.9M seed investments from various angel and institutional investors and still an active operational company based in Los Angeles, CA.

When I was working on designing and building Curbstand, I was also in the process of starting my own studio “Thunderbolt” in Beverly Hills, CA, and when we launched Curbstand, it became Thunderbolt’s first portfolio project. At Thunderbolt we built mobile apps, websites, games, creative campaigns, and all kinds of digital products for global brands like Beats by Dre, Alaska Airlines, Verizon Wireless and Fox Sports etc. At Thunderbolt we also built several other startup projects. The first legally approved medical cannabis delivery platform called “Grassp” was one of them. Grassp also raised $1,5M from Angel Investors.

In 2018 I started a new company, an equity-crowdfunding / digital fundraising platform aiming to help digital & gaming startups to raise funds on a digital interface. Less than a year after starting Thunderbolt Creative Digital Gaming, the company got acquired by Toronto Based, New Wave Holdings (aka New Wave eSports) which invests into eSports & Gaming companies. Shortly after, I was appointed as the Managing Partner & CEO of New Wave Holdings and I helped the company to become a publicly traded company in 2019.

After some break, I joined the Loop EV Charging Network as the Vice President and I helped the company to increase sales from <$500k to $6.5M and secure $65M total investments in less than 2 years. After Loop, I was the Vice President of Envoy, and I helped to transform the company’s ride sharing platform into an enterprise fleet tracking and communications platform in less than 18 months and I helped the company to get acquired for $34M by Blink Charging (NASDAQ:BLNK) in 2023.

Since then, I have been working on a new exciting e-mobility startup.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

I started my first company with very limited capital and in the course of 18 months my company generated close to $1.5M revenue by building software applications and digital campaigns for exciting SoCal startups. At some point I was managing close to 30 people including both in-house and overseas engineering resources. When people in LA did not even know that they could build digital projects overseas, my company Thunderbolt became one of the first development powerhouses to streamline overseas software engineering for local companies and startups.

In later stages, as the founder of Thunderbolt, I was re-investing $30-50 thousand a month of my own personal savings, and I was struggling to raise investment funds to further develop a digital platform which was aimed to raise funds for early-stage startups. After almost a year of searching for the right investment partner, I received an offer from an eSports Investment company based in Toronto, which desired to acquire my company and further invest into the Thunderbolt equity-crowdfunding platform in the beginning of 2019.

The fact that I never quit and continued losing money for the sake of keeping my venture going was an act of (crazy) bravery, however I managed to close the deal, and later on, I was appointed as the CEO of the Investment Company.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

After selling my company Thunderbolt CDG, I was appointed as the CEO of New Wave Holdings (Formerly known as New Wave eSports)

While building Thunderbolt CDG, we made various investments into exciting eSports ventures in Canada, and most of these ventures were focused on in-person tournaments and events. I played an important role in establishing the growth strategy of New Wave and I started the reverse-merger acquisition process which allowed New Wave to become a publicly traded company at the Canadian Stock Market (CSE:NWAI).

I had sold my company in exchange of shares, so when the 2020 lockdowns happened, this significantly affected the share price of the parent investment company, because of our eSports investments in events & tournaments. On paper, I lost hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions during this disastrous year.

This made me switch industries, and since 2020, I have focused on the new emerging industry of EVs and EV Charging.

In the past 4-5 years, I helped Loop EV Charging Network to raise $5M Seed and $60M Series A funding, and I played a pivotal role of the delivery of an enterprise fleet tracking platform which allowed Envoy to get acquired by Blink Charging (NASDAQ:BLNK) for $34M on April 2023. Currently I am working on a new exciting EV Charging Network startup venture as the Chief Product Officer & Interim CMO.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.tolgaonuk.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tolgaonuk
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tolgaonuk
• Twitter: https://www.x.com/tolgaonuk
• Soundcloud: https://www.soundcloud.com/tolgaonuk

Image Credits

In the first photo I am with my fiancé Paula Potry – A Finnish Model, Influencer and Entrepreneur.