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Who Is Chris Do & The Futur? Origin story
Chris Do shares his origin story, from an 'unemployable' designer to the accidental entrepreneur who founded The Futur.
Chris Do
Founder, The Futur™ · February 24, 2024
An Act of Insubordination
It was a simple request from a new boss, and it was met with five words that ended a career before it truly began. “I respectfully decline.”
Chris Do, a young designer barely out of school, looked his superior in the eye and walked out of the corner office. He knew what he’d just done. It was an act of insubordination. A high-paying job at a prestigious Seattle ad agency, Cole & Weber, was about to go up in flames. He walked the 300 feet back to his own small office, a dingy closet next to the bathroom, and awaited the inevitable. The phone rang.
It was his real boss, Kevin Jones, a man Do describes as “the world’s best boss.” He had heard what happened. But instead of firing him, Jones told him to go home and take a break. The next day, he offered to move Do to a different account.
This was the golden opportunity, the escape hatch. But Do had realized something fundamental. “Kevin, I just realized something,” Do recalls saying. “In this world, I am not appreciated and I will never feel like I belong.”
He quit. A job that paid $85,000 a year in 1995, a staggering sum for a new graduate, was gone. He walked away from the superstar trajectory, the expense account, and the security. It was a decision rooted not in arrogance, but in a profound self-awareness that had been building since childhood. It was the moment he confirmed a core truth about himself.
He was unemployable.
The Engineer and The Artist
To understand the 'why' behind that decision, you have to go back to San Jose, California. You have to understand the two worlds that created Chris Do.
He is the middle child of Vietnamese immigrants who fled the fall of Saigon when he was just three years old. Sponsored by a Catholic church, his family landed in Kansas City before eventually regrouping with extended family in Silicon Valley. It was a classic immigrant story defined by a relentless pursuit of the American dream.
Do’s family was a study in contrasts. His father was an engineer, surrounded by siblings who all worked in technical, stable jobs in Silicon Valley. They were the embodiment of logic and security. His mother’s side was the opposite. They were, as Do puts it, “super like emotional, beautiful, artistic people. Photographer, painter, artists. All broke.”
This duality defined his upbringing. He had an older brother who became a software engineer with a Master’s degree from Stanford, and a younger brother who became a free-form artist with no college degree. Do landed squarely in the middle.
The expectation from his parents, particularly his father, was clear. Education was the only path. “When you have nothing,” Do explains, “what is the way that you can move up? And the only path that was clear at that time was through education.”
The pressure was immense. Straight A’s were not a goal; they were the baseline. A ‘B’ was a problem. A ‘C’ was a catastrophe. Do recalls the time he knew a C was coming on his report card. Every day after school, he raced home to intercept the mail before his parents returned from work. It was his first lesson in high-stakes creative problem-solving.
When the perforated, carbon-copy report card arrived, he put his mother’s design tools to work. Using her electric eraser, a professional drafting tool, he meticulously removed the offending grade. “I’m like, what should I give myself?” he remembers. “‘A’ is too much. I’m going to give myself a ‘B’.”
He dulled a number two pencil to match the monospaced typeface, practiced drawing the letter, and carefully forged the new grade. For good measure, he smudged it with a bit of carbon to give it “war damage.” The GPA total was off, but his parents never noticed. It was a pre-Photoshop act of forgery born from a desperate need to survive a rigid system.
The Call of the Crest
While his family pushed academics, Do was quietly developing an obsession. He didn’t have a name for it at the time, but he was fascinated by emblems, logos, and crests. He later learned the term was heraldry. He was drawn to fashion brands with crests and Ivy League schools not for their prestige, but for their cool shield emblems.
His true entry point into the world of design, however, came from an unlikely source: skateboarding.
- Powell-Peralta
- Santa Cruz Skateboards
- Dogtown
- Santa Monica Airlines
These weren't just skateboard companies; they were brands with powerful visual identities. “The companies I found the greatest connection with had the best graphics,” he says. This connection between art, identity, and culture was a revelation, linking him to a whole generation of artists like Mark Gonzales and Ed Templeton who found their creative voice through skate culture.
But when it came time for college, he still tried to play the game. He applied to UCLA, UC San Diego, and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, listing “Art” as his major only because he thought it would be an easier back door into a good school. He was wrong. The request for a portfolio shocked him. Unsurprisingly, he was rejected by all three.
He held onto the rejection letter from UCLA. “You demonstrate potential, but you’re not ready,” it read. The words stung. For an Asian kid from an immigrant family, landing in community college felt like purgatory. “You’re not alive, you’re not dead, you’re just somewhere in between.”
The turning point came from a former boss at a screen-printing shop. The boss, a burly rugby player named Brad, gave him a blunt piece of advice. “He goes, ‘Well, you need to go to ArtCenter in LA. There’s all these cocky bastards just like you. You’ll fit right in’,” Do recounts. The name “ArtCenter” sounded generic, but it was a lead.
In his first community college class, an instructor named Candace Lopez told the students to write down their goals. Do wrote that he wanted to build a portfolio to get into ArtCenter. Seeing his clarity of vision, she vowed to help him. For two semesters, he focused on a single goal: get into ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena. He didn't know it then, but he was aiming for one of the best and most demanding design schools in the world. He got in.
The Failure of the Ivory Tower
ArtCenter delivered on its promise of rigor, but it also delivered a dose of harsh reality. The tuition was a shock to his father, matching the cost of Stanford. As Do progressed, he grew disillusioned. He saw a system churning out graduates saddled with immense debt and questionable skills. He wasn't just learning design; he was learning about the flawed business of education, a theme he explores in his content like Personal Brand vs Business Brand Strategy.
The most heartbreaking moment came when he ran into a graduate from the year before. “I go to a Blockbuster, I see him working behind the counter, and it broke my heart,” Do says. “This person is saddled with so much debt and they would never be able to pay it back.”
He saw the problem clearly. When education is a product you pay for, the school has a responsibility to deliver value. He felt there was a shortage of high-quality teachers, and the institution itself was failing its students. This critique of the educational-industrial complex would become a cornerstone of his future work. A degree is a poor estimation of a person's knowledge and skills that can be applied.
Yet, amidst this disillusionment, he found what he was truly looking for: real masters. While freelancing to pay for school, he worked for Kyle Cooper and Garson Yu at RGA, who would later found the legendary motion design studio Imaginary Forces. These were not just designers; they were scholars of the craft.
They had studied at Yale under the design legend Paul Rand. They had attended lectures by Armin Hofmann. Their knowledge was deep, their eye for detail was unparalleled, and their standards were ferocious. This was a different kind of education.
“When Garson told me to typeset it in Bembo, but not Adobe Bembo,” Do recalls, “he wanted that cut of... holy crap, you’re that specific.” Yu would pull out an old book to show the original letterforms and instruct Do to redraw the characters, not to use the “junk font that everybody’s using.”
This was the authority he could respect. This was true mentorship. He says, “I will go into shark-infested waters with you because you know what you’re doing. I’m going to learn a lot.” The contrast was stark. The institution offered a piece of paper. The masters offered a lineage.
The Accidental Entrepreneur
After walking away from the $85,000 ad agency job, Do was adrift. He had skipped all the on-campus interviews and portfolio reviews, convinced he was set. Now he had no job and no prospects. He freelanced around Los Angeles, including a short stint at the punk rock label Epitaph Records during the meteoric rise of The Offspring.
Then came the call that changed everything. It was from his uncle, Michael.
“I know since you were a kid you've always wanted to start a business,” his uncle said. “Are you still interested?”
Do’s answer was an emphatic yes. His uncle and his business partner, who ran boutique hotels, wanted to finance a design company. They tasked him with writing a business proposal.
The meeting took place over dinner. Do handed over what he calls a “piece of crap” 14-page business plan with phantom financial projections. His uncle’s partner, Bob, barely glanced at it. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a checkbook, and wrote a check for $5,000.
“This is a good faith gesture,” Bob said, handing it to the stunned 20-something-year-old. “It looks like you’re asking for 100 grand. Consider that an early deposit.”
Do was off to the races. He had $5,000 in hand, which felt like a fortune to someone with maxed-out credit cards from school. He immediately quit his freelance gig. This was the birth of his company, Blind. It was pure accidental entrepreneurship.
But there was a catch. In his excitement, Do had given away 51% of his company for a mere $5,000 promise. He quickly realized his mistake, thinking, “I’m already profitable... I only got 5,000 bucks and I gave away 51% of my company. World’s dumbest business investment.”
Fortune, however, intervened. His partners ran into financial trouble with an overseas hotel development and couldn’t focus on the new design venture. They defaulted on their agreement. Do kept the $5,000, closed the business, and immediately started a new one with the same name. He was once again a free man, and this time, he owned 100% of his future. The failed partnership became his greatest stroke of luck, a lesson in how constraints can become opportunities, a topic often discussed in creative business circles like in How He Went from Freelancing Into a 7-Figure Agency.
Blind would go on to run successfully for over two decades, becoming a powerhouse in the motion design industry. Do never had to crawl back for a job. He proved that being unemployable wasn't a liability. It was a prerequisite for the path he was meant to walk.
Live a Life First
Today, Chris Do is no longer just the founder of a design agency. He is the founder of The Futur, an education platform built on the very principles he discovered through his own tumultuous journey. His critique of the traditional education system is not just an opinion; it is his company’s mission.
He sees a system that creates a dangerous paradox for students:
- Guaranteed Debt: School is one of the only places a person with no credit can get a massive, government-backed loan.
- Inescapable Burden: Student loan debt is one of the only forms of debt that cannot be discharged through bankruptcy.
- Misaligned Incentives: He argues that institutions can feel more like front-of-house for banks than centers for learning, with boards that are structured to kill innovative ideas rather than embrace risk.
This system, he believes, is failing young, optimistic people who do everything they’re told, only to end up in their mid-20s with a mortgage-sized debt and no career. It’s why he champions alternative models and believes new leaders will step in to create better systems, much like the advice shared for entrepreneurs in Your Dream Doesn't Need Money, It Needs This.
His philosophy is most clearly seen in the advice he gives his own children. When his oldest son wanted to go to Columbia University, Do supported him, recognizing his son’s need for structure and his connection to brand names. But for his younger son, who wants to pursue art, the advice is radically different.
“I’m going to go to art school,” his son declared.
“No, you’re not,” Do responded.
Instead of another four years in a classroom, Do is prescribing a different kind of education. A gap year dedicated to life itself. Live life first.
“I want you to study humanities, I want you to study art and history, and you can live wherever you want in the world,” Do told him. “You want to live in Paris and throw pots? Do that. If you want to go paint with people in Spain, go do that. Just do something with your life first before you go to an art school.”
The reasoning is simple and profound. You cannot create from a vacuum.
“You’ve lived nothing. You have nothing to reflect into the world,” Do explains. Without real-world experience, culture, sociology, and philosophy, an artist is left with nothing but imitation. “You’re going to regurgitate all that garbage that people are doing online right now.”
This is the culmination of his entire origin story. The son of an engineer and an artist. The kid who forged a report card. The designer who respected masters over institutions. The employee who was too stubborn to follow orders. The founder who built a company by accident.
Every step was a rejection of the predetermined path. Every act of defiance was a step toward a more authentic identity.
The lesson is not to avoid education. It is to redefine it.
It's a call to build a life rich enough to be worthy of your art. Because in the end, your portfolio is not just the work you’ve done. It’s the life you’ve lived.
TRANSCRIPT
as a designer we want to make things we want to push the envelope we want to try things and we we we we want to be messy and crazy when you declared art as your major what was your parents reaction um I think they my dad thought it was a joke I think
he was in denial I didn't know it at the time but I had an unhealthy obsession with emblems logos I didn't even know that was a thing and I was going through a really rough patch I was becoming really disillusioned with school I had another semester to finish but I was like this
place sucks everything's terrible I hate this I'm not getting any real value anymore so I'm like I'm going to take a semester off I'm going to apply for this job yeah so within months I'm moving up that ladder really quick so I'm flying back and forth feeling like a superstar cuz I'm like
I'm going to work in the Ad Agency and the call comes from my uncle I know since you were a kid you've always wanted to start a business are you still interested in doing like I'm like heck yeah he goes my business partner and I want to start a design company he reaches
in his pocket I'm like what's happening what's happening he starts writing his check I'm like that can't be for for me he hands it across the table it's like this is a good faith gesture I'm interested in running doing the business with you it looks like you're asking for 100 grand consider that
an early deposit yeah so I'm off to the racist so did you feel like you got what you needed to get out of school that's a loaded question I I I would not be here today if I didn't but a degree is a poor estimation of a person's knowledge and and skills that
can be applied just do something with your life first before you go to an art school because you've lived nothing you have nothing to reflect into the world and that's what you're going to do you're G to regurgitate all that garbage that people are doing online right now I've heard you speak fairly
extensively about pricing I think in life when you're set off in the right direction everything becomes much easier so what I'm about to tell you came from a just being very blessed and fortunate to be exactly where I'm supposed to be to do this thing right hey what's going on everybody welcome back
to another episode of the Travis makes Friends Podcast today I am making friends with Chris doe Chris what's up man welcome to the show thanks so much for having me man yes sir happy to uh be here in Las Vegas like 5 minutes from my house but it is not home for you
you're out in pastina yep have you been there for a long time um in and out but now we we recently moved so we've been in the house now for a little over a year okay yeah uh where did you where did you grow up I grew up in Northern California in San
Jose um moved down to Los Angeles to go to school and I've been in La ever since so the debate what's NorCal versus SoCal what's oh you want me to create war with my family exactly what I want you to do soal I'm going to send it to them yeah SoCal it is
yeah I mean I I'm biased cuz I grew up in SoCal but um spent a decent amount of time in in Northern California as well but man I just can't I can't beat the SoCal Vibes man yep every time I go back I'm like ah I think I could deal with the taxes
like but I moved out to Vegas maybe six years ago now so you know we've been out here for a little for a little while but man you can't beat the weather out there that's the one thing you can't there's nowhere that I've been to that compares to just constantly being like knowing
knowing to like a you know 85% amount of being sure that you can walk outside at any given point and being like yeah it's nice out here it's hard to beat I've traveled a lot throughout the world and every time I ask myself this question since I can live anywhere and work anywhere
it's just a conscious decision to be here and every time we go back like it's not dry it's not humid it's not too cold and it's mostly warm and pleasant and sunshiny and beautiful people and interesting foods and cultures and industry it's the right mix yeah no kidding you can get anywhere with
the you know several different airport options especially in pastina you're not like in the Heart of Los Angeles where it's where it's as bad you're kind of away from some of the traffic at least like obviously there's still traffic everywhere but that's the worst part yeah yeah the 210s still got a lot
of traffic on it not as much as the five but it's still going to be look at two so cow guys talking about the five to 405 to d10 yeah oh man but hey man thanks for coming on the show I appreciate you uh rich and I have been trying to make this
happen for a little for a little while now so I'm happy it just kind of last minute ended up working out yeah um so let's kind of dive a little bit deeper so you grew up in in uh NorCal y describe for me set the scene for me of like 9-year-old Christo um
so family life you know school life all that kind of stuff at 9 years old at the scene living in the Valley San Jose um Suburban neighborhood middle class income okay um still trying to figure things out 9 years old would be probably as my parents still trying to move up from the
lower middle class as we kind of Ascend and pursue the American dream every couple of years my parents move us because their jobs afford us a better life and so we move from pretty rough parts to like upper middle class neighborhoods and I always identified as us as being poor and was shocked
one day to find out because we had to fill out some paperwork for school how much our parents made I'm like Mom Dad we're not poor not based on these numbers why do we still live this way like that's just the way uh first generation immigrant first generation immigrant yeah okay how do
you think that that affected you growing up absolutely how do you think it affected you um well I don't have any memory of my home country okay um so you he very little when yeah I was three years old when we fled Saigon fall of saon communism Escape land in Kansas City go
to move to San Jose eventually but land in Kansas City yeah it's it's a sponsor thing oh gotcha gotcha you know large families they need someone to help them acclimate so it's usually Church based gotcha so we're Catholic Catholic woman her name is Aunt Barney older white lady her her husband had passed
and she sponsored our family other families were sponsored in Arkansas some in San Jose but my parents huge amilies So eventually we kind of regroup into like one place and smart enough to realize that San Jose is a better place to live than Kansas City I think it was just kind of random
to be honest yeah I really do really San Jose because more more of my father's uh siblings lived in San Jose there was a different sponsor there are more sponsors and so then they're just like hey it's easier to move one family than to move six families or or six siblings you know
it's just a lot easier that way it's a good decision though yeah yeah right right definitely definitely a little a little bit better of a spot yeah uh so education was that a big push I find I find fairly often whenever I speak to anybody who's first generation immigrants it's like almost skewed
High uh expectations uh in terms of Education was that similar for you guys or different okay there's truth there certain stereotypes and if you think about it when you have nothing you you lose your country your culture everything about what you had what is the way that you can move up and the
only only path that was clear at that time was through education so education very important I remember this I I think I was in junior high maybe U maybe so Elementary and I found out like one of my friends from school white kid his dad bought him a BMX bike when he got
seiz for his report card if I got C's I'm packing my bags and leaving home you know enough bees and and we're having problems it's the expectation is you must get straight A's and that's it right there should be no deviation um so the and I'll tell you I've told this story before
there was once I got a C and it was not a good scene so you know what I did every day because I knew I was getting a c and I think it was a science class I rushed home to intercept the mail and I ran home every day I'm like oh my
God okay cuz my parents work so they're going to come home at 5: and so as long as I get there before you got you got the two hour I have a 2hour window uh I intercepted the the mail and it's one of these ones that are like you tear at the edge
perforated and you rip it open and this carbon copy you know it's a carbon print yep and that's how I learned how to do forgery pre Photoshop so I took my mom's um electric razor my mom's a designer draft at IBM she has all these drafting tools and there's this thing it's a
massive electrical powered eraser with this long you know like tools to slowly erase that c I'm like what should I give myself what should I give myself right now how ambitious am I yeah Richard's mouth is wide open right now Chris you're not as Square as we thought so you know what you
do you take a blunt number two pencil and you dull it down so it's the same width as this mono character Ty face that you have and you practice redrawing characters on the front and then you make sure it's kind of like the same so then you move it over where it's supposed
to go and I'm like a is too much I'm going to give myself a b b and then but a plus I Flags right and then it looks a little fake for sure and then you take the carbon you rub it so you smudge a little bit you give a little war damage
and then you put it right back in there like like no problem the thing about it is though if you add up the GPA doesn't equal the number oh no so it's cool my parents were none the wiser to this day I'm sure they still think I never got to see this day
really wow until they listen to this and then I'm dead yeah well I already I already told you I'm sending it statue of limitations man it's expired science was that uh one of your not interested subjects you know I I I'm I wasn't very interested in school and I I'm trying to figure
this thing out because I got A's very easily I I wasn't even paying attention so School boarded me I went to public high school and and public school so the topics never interested me except for the electives and my my older brother who's really smart ambitious guy got his master's degree from Stanford
just to show you the Gap in brain power I was just like let me take shop let me take woods and metal shop cuz that's a yearbook and he's like what are you doing these are fun this is what I want to do so I would apply myself to those electives but never
to other stuff I and I could listen and and pass the exam I would do the the the what is that called crunch time studying sure and I would memorize what vocabulary words and then it was gone the next day yeah I'm done but it was easy is there besides just that are
there other kind of personality differences between you and that sibling like I guess I guess really what I'm asking is more about the creative personality type versus other types of personalities cuz it seems like that was just something that was kind of just in you from the beginning yeah there I I'm the
middle child of three children I have two brothers and the age difference is four years from my older brother and then one year from my younger brother oh wow okay and the interesting thing about my mom and dad is there are two my uncles and aunts from both sides of the family could
not be more different my dad's an engineer um all his brothers and sisters are in Silicon Valley doing something technical fairly stable income doing quite well American s right M and then on my mom side of the family they're all super like emotional beautiful artistic people photographer painter artists all broke all trying
to figure out life many divorces and all stable it could not be more different interesting and then I am in the middle but quite literally the middle of my two parents yeah my older brother super logical computer science software engineer Works in Silicon Valley does really well for himself my younger brother is
a free form artist person who who never went to college so you have a guy who's got this master's degree from Stanford and a person who never went to college and I'm right in the middle I got a Bachelor's degree in art and design right it's like the at the time when you
declared art as your major what was your parents reaction um I think they my dad thought it was a joke I think he was in denial and he he couldn't it's like all right good one good and it's not that it was my first choice either because I applied to UCLA UC San
Diego and cowply uh s Louis abiso and I only changed it to Art because I thought it was going to be easier to get into the program interesting I thought I was going to still like sneak in the back door and then I was a little shocked and scared when they said send
us your portfolio I'm like portfolio yeah wait a minute I have a couple of pieces but I don't have a portfolio so I submit my portfolio and unsurprisingly got rejected out of all three schools and I had this little bitterness like feeling quite dejected thinking my God I couldn't get into a single
School I wish I saved the letter but I do remember it the one from UCLA who said um you demonstrate potential but you're not ready I'm like I'll show you one day I don't got potential or you know I'm not ready it was it was true I wasn't ready yeah yeah so I
went to Community College and that's like for Asian kids like Purgatory you're not alive you're not dead you're just somewhere in between yeah you're just acceptable yeah and then you go to vocational school and become a mechanic or something and you're the shame to your whole family yeah so then what happened after
Community College well luckily my older brother um and he he was to me like a Sur father he looked out for me he said hey come to San Diego I'm studying preparing for grad school you can come live here get away and we we always use this term the parental units uh so
that you can start to figure out your own identity and so I went there and I started to enroll in in design programs and it's like this thing called Commercial Art like this is cool I went through an entire freaking catalog looking for something I wanted to take so you still you still
had this propensity toward art the whole time like there was nothing that was ever like to go the mechanic route or to go a different rout go back academics or like just art was just some it always called to you yeah more specifically graphic design okay so there were painting classes illustration classes
but the one I went to was like screen printing graphic design intro to to computer AED design or something like that that's what I was interested in they have anything to do with your mom being that like being in that world at all I don't think so my mom is a self-taught artist
herself she paints with oils and pastels she worked at IBM as a designer drafter working on chip design chipboard designs back then they used to do it by hand like like a th% magnification or something like that and that's what she used to do but it I don't think it came from that
it's just I didn't know it at the time but I had an unhealthy obsession with emblems logos I didn't even know that was a thing I was attracted to fashion brands that had Crest I I wanted to go to to Yale or Harvard because I thought what is this cool Shield emblem they
got where these other schools have nothing and I I later on learned the term heraldry and these Crest meant something and I was just like really drawn into that yeah um I skateboarded and the the companies I found the greatest connection with had the best graphics so I was into P Peralta Santa
Cruz skateboards Dogtown U Santa Monica Airlines just because they had in Sims the coolest designs and and and this is I don't think this is uh unusual in that there are a lot of artists who found their way to Art Through Skateboarding because of the design aspect of it really yeah Mark Gonzalez
is an artist there's a bunch of people out there that are artists um at Templeton there's a bunch and they find it Through Skateboarding wow that's wild so so you you have this kind of curiosity let's call it about branding design it's not going away and you go further down the rabbit hole
through the Community College time so then you start reapplying to to different schools at this point yeah so my last year in high school now that I've been rejected out of every school I wind up working at a s screening shop and my boss his name is Brad shabuya He's this really Burly
stocky guy he plays rugby his nose is broken like three times he has a mustache and he has a really deep voice and he goes Chris what are you going to do after school like I don't know I think I'm going to go to arts school he goes well you need to go
to art centers in La there's all these cocky bastards just like you you'll fit right in I'm like art center that sounds like the most generic school name ever right and so when my mom asked me what are you going to do I said Mom I'm going go to Art Center she goes
you are and so this pre- internet my mom starts doing research calls and finds out the school and finds out how much it costs to go there and she has sticker shock and to my dad's dismay the tuition to go to Art Center is the exact same as Stanford and he's like why
couldn't you go to Stanford I'm like Dad I would go to Stanford they could accept me yeah but I'm clearly not smart enough to go there I've got a 3.8 GPA you know I didn't take any interesting extra curriculars I didn't write a great essay it's not happeny dad so it's one of
those things where he's like he just looked at the tuition's the same why can't you go to prestigious school instead of going to Dead End School right but I know nothing about art center except for it's in La except for one person had told me that's where you need to go he could
have told me go to Ry go to School of Visual Arts or some other school and that's where I would have gone so first class San Diego City College Candace Lopez says get a journal and then write in your journal for week two what you want to do where you want to be
I wrote in there I I want to put my portfolio together so I can get into art center and that's what I want to do with my life and she just wrote this giant thing and I wish I had that notebook still it's like oh my God this is a place for you
I will do everything in my power to help you it's super exciting I was probably one of the few people who wrote in their Journal that had a Clear Vision as to where I want it to be yeah so for the next two semesters I worked on my portfolio to get into art
center wow okay so that's where you ended up going yep and it's a real school it happens to be one of the best schools in the country yeah and I'm so fortunate that by circumstance I was recommended to go to that school yeah well yeah no kidding no kidding um okay so uh
shortly after this and I've heard this part of the story so I want you to kind of piece this together for us if you if you can just like timeline wise shortly after this you get an offer to do a business partnership with somebody and they're basically saying like we want to do
some design we need you to be the designer but we'll basically fill up your entire workload and we'll do all these so so piece together the story the timeline here of like what happens in between this this time where you're in uh in school and then this business opportunity kind of just pops
up out of nowhere yeah so I'll give you I'll pre-roll the tape a little bit so set up the context yeah December of 1994 as we're wrapping up the semester one of my friends uh who's a copywriter name is Colleen matys she goes Chris I got a job at col Weber in Seattle
and and I'm a copywriter but I need a partner an art director and they ask me do I know anybody and I recommended you can you send your portfolio um to them to see if you and I was going through really rough patch I was becoming really disillusioned with school I had another
semester to finish but I was like this place sucks everything's terrible I hate this I'm not getting any real value anymore so I'm like I'm gonna take a semester off I'm gonna apply for this job I'm not an advertising major so I'm like I'm probably not g to get the job so I
instead of putting a lot of pieces in the portfolio I put in four only four and I put them inside a FedEx box and I sent it out these are the four of the most conceptual design oriented things I've got hopefully that's enough they called me uh Dolly called me and said we're
going to hire you we're going to pay $40,000 a year I tried to negotiate she said we're going to pay $40,000 a year I said thank you ma'am and you're going to say thank you that was it and so now we're heading into 1995 January I'm I'm working in Seattle and I finish
I didn't finish but uh I need to go back to school and finish my last semester and so Kevin Kevin Jones my boss like we want you to keep working here I'm like how's that possible I got to go back to school he said we'll fly you back and forth I was like
holy crap I I a 21y old kid I have an expense account I'm flying back and forth I'm pitching on big accounts I I was like I'm I'm just freaking super lucky as heck he offers me a job he offers me to uh to pay me $85,000 a year and she had just
negotiated me 40K yeah so within months I'm moving up that ladder really quick so I'm flying back and forth feeling like a superstar I didn't even care about my classes where I'm just going through the motions and just turning in projects whatever I don't go through uh any of the portfolio orientation senior
portfolio or any of the on campus interviews cuz I'm like I'm going to work in the Ad Agency sure well a couple of weeks or into that I'm like oh this is not working for me something happened so I quit working at the agency so now I'm screwed and I graduate no job
no interviews I don't know what I'm doing you didn't do any of the I didn't prepare Jack I skipped all those things I'm good I'm good people don't waste my time so what happened was one of my buddies a guy who was um I looked up to who graduated many semesters before me
he was working at this punk rock music label called Epitaph records and right then the offing what's that based in La based in La yeah The Offspring in punk rock was making its huge Resurgence and it was blowing up everywhere I got to meet Mr Brett from Bad Religion and he said our
company grew 1,000% last year it was nutso like Punk was everywhere and so I W up working there just for a few months a month and a half and then my boss gets fired I'm like I'm out he's gone I'm gone you know it wasn't like days after but it was pretty quick
and now what so I'm freelancing around La and this is when the Call Comes and the call comes from my uncle his name is Michael he calls me and he's like I know since you were a kid you've always wanted to start a business are you still interested in doing like I'm like
heck yeah he goes my business partner and I want to start a design company we we run hotels boutique hotels I'm like okay right write a business proposal we'll meet you and we'll Finance your thing and that's what wound up happening so over dinner at the Western Bond Adventure uh his business partner
Bob writes a check on the spot hasn't even read my business plan I handed him a business plan that was piece of crap is like 14 pages with Phantom projections about what we're going to make in three years I don't know what I'm doing yeah and he well really nobody knows what they're
doing when they're writing a business plan well yeah especially a 20y old kid who's never run a business before know anything yeah and he just thumbs through he's like okay he reaches in his pocket what's happening what's happening he starts writing his check I'm like that can't be for me it's a $5,000
check he tears it off one of these long ones he hands it across the table it's like this is a good faith gesture I'm interested in running doing the business with you it looks like you're asking for 100 grand consider that an early deposit yeah so I'm off to the racist five grand
feels like 100 Grand when you're five grand when you're broke and you have a a massive amount of credit card debt I had maxed out two credit cards at that point in time to just put myself through school right right right um and I go and tell the person I'm freelancing for yep
when this booking is over I'm done I'm starting my own business see you I didn't say like that but the interesting thing was Ian Dawson was the executive producer at this company called novacom and he had also offered me a job and he's like we're going to pay you 55k I said Ian
the last job I offered me 80 and I walked away from that job yeah if there's not an eight in front of that number I'm not even interested and I know what he's thinking you cocky mother effer you just get out of school you don't even know aspect racials you don't know nothing
but I hear people like to work with you here yeah right and I said yeah so what happened was I started telling my co-workers uh yeah I'm going to go start my own company so the words traveled really fast so Ian with a big smile he's like Chris you didn't give me a
chance to counter you didn't give me a chance to counter I said Ian You Had Your Shot yeah I'm such a bastard I'm just telling you right now like he had like two days to respond and you didn't respond in affirmative you know so I'm like yeah I'm out he says well best
of luck to you and I know Ian we're friends now I know when he said best of luck to you it's like you're going to come back crawling going to work because you don't know Jack Talent will not be the thing that takes you through so I wind up opening a business called
it blind and started doing work and fortunately for me my business partners at the time who owned 51% of the company had financial problems one of the hotels that were developing overseas was having some problems some government issues right so they're like we can't focus on this I said well where's the money
because I'm running a business and I'm already profitable yeah I'm kicking myself in the butt thinking I only got 5,000 bucks and I gave away 51% of my company world's dumbest business investment this doesn't make any sense luckily they defaulted I kept the 5,000 bucks I was once again a free man H
interesting okay so the business basically just got turned over to you yeah basically I closed a business started another business called the same thing and changed to like two words and now we're in business again yeah and how did that version of the business go that that version of business went from December
of 1995 to uh I think 2019 yeah so it went for a while so you never went back and asked for the other job no I'm not and somebody told me Chris you're unemployable and like it's true I'm unemployable I cannot work for people yeah why is that why why do you think
that is because I'm I'm too stubborn I have ideas and I don't like the way people do things and I have a strong opinion right so the reason why I wound up not working for the Ad Agency had the best boss in the world Kevin Jones is an amazing person but I saw
two things that happened which I think I was just being a little cranky and and arrogant at the time but I had worked on this big pitch for Silicon Valley um this uh computer SG Silicon Valley Graphics or something like that um the they made superc computers to render like frames for like
Abyss to James Cameron film and Co Weber won the account and they had a party and I wasn't in town so had the party without me I'm like I was one of six people worked on this couldn't you guys have just tried to coordinate with me going back and forth I felt a
little left out I'm like is this how Corporate America works I'm not saying I carried the account but I was a part of it sure and the other thing is once they got the account I started working on it they had to hire a whole bunch of new people and so I I
was reporting to a new boss and that boss I don't think he liked me I don't think he respected me and and you didn't really much care for him I was willing ready to do whatever but when you don't respect me like I don't know what to do here yeah right right you
know I'll tell you and I'll tell the story I don't care he's a great copywriter and I'm a leper in the ad world because I'm a designer I'm not a conceptual thinker I don't know the ad game like art directors do and I got that title so what he wind up doing is
he was working with his art Direction partner from the other office instead of working with me and so his partner would like come up with designs and Concepts and then he said can you just lay these out I'm like there's a whole department over there that does that mechanical work I'm not that
guy this is silly and I don't agree with any of your design decisions here this is this felt like an insult to me because I actually designed the work that was part of the winning pitch right and so it weird what's like the reason that you're working here is because think the Reon
brought over from the other office to run this team was because myself and a couple other really brilliant creatives on the account right and I know what happened he had said Chris I just need you to do this and I looked him right in eye in his office in the corner office and
said well I don't want to say his name I respectfully declin and I walked out of his office and I I was sitting there thinking I knew he wanted to throw something at me yeah and I just walked out and I walked back to my dingy little closet office right next to the
bathroom and then the phone rings I'm like oh my God I'm telling you it's not 300 ft from his office to this little corner the phone rings I pick it up and it's my real boss Kevin he goes Chris I heard what happened I'm like okay fire me like by the time you
got back to your literally I walked back there and the phone rang and I knew it was going to happen you can't tell your boss I respectfully declined that's like giving him the one finger salute right that's an act of insubordination I'd fir me the phone rings I'm picking up like I he's
like I heard what happened I'm like yeah he goes I want you to go home you just take a break let's talk tomorrow I said okay hung up the phone he didn't yell at me I'm like what's going on this is weird next morning he called me I mean I'm in the office
again he goes let's get you on a different account he's like it doesn't have to be this way I said Kevin I just realized something and I'm glad it happened in this world I am not appreciated and I would never feel like I belong so I'm going to go back to school and
I'm going to finish and I really appreciate you giv me this opportunity and he goes okay okay I totally understand why don't we just keep it open for you know he was the he's the world's best boss I I've only had a couple bosses in my life if I could choose I would
always choose to work for him he's the most generous gracious person super understanding and he treated me like a star and so that was like one of these things where I I just there's too much around you Kevin and you can't change that right and if I could only just work for you
I would but I can so yeah you're you're also kind of chained by the circumstances yeah I mean think about it like as a designer we want to make things we want to push the envelope we want to try things and we we we we want to be messy and crazy in the
ad world is like make it as simple as possible just do Center type and all caps and let's just be done with it right they kind of frowned upon traditional advertising frowned upon overly designed ads there were a couple agencies however that were groundbreaking that worked with designers and pushed them to their
front Why didn't Kennedy who does Nike work Christen Porter buuski who uh who had this Superstar Alex buuski there were a couple of agencies in America that were pushing the edge European agencies were already doing this so America was like Futura condense bold all caps on a white background just do that we'll
be good so like why are you hiring designers you know well see in their world copywriters ruled right they're the ones who captur the imagination who who form the ideas who write the messaging everything they ruled and writers who had an aesthetic were called Art directors a designer like myself was usually in
the back room working on production art do do you think that all of this is kind of what also disillusioned you from going to school as well like that's kind of the same the same kind of attitude toward people I I find that people who are not great at being an employee meaning
they don't like people telling them what to do like exactly what you're describing are also so not great going to school and being in this context of like do this do that don't do this don't do that and having a lot of rules and things like that was that what it was for
you or was it something else this is a com a complex question that you're asking the reason why I was disillusioned with school was tuition was so much and I could see now that there going to be a bunch of people are going to graduate who didn't have skills they're going to be
in deep trouble I remember one time there was a guy who graduated I think a year before me and I was like I wonder what he's doing and I go to a blockbuster I see him working behind the counter and it broke my heart I kid you not this is not a fabricated
story like this is really rough because now this person is saddled with so much debt and they would never be able to pay it back I'm sure it was a temporary glitch in The Matrix I'm sure he figured it out but the fact that that was his job after going to school for
four years that's rough and that's a reality the the school Stamp Out students and that's okay when it's being paid for but when you pay for it that's not okay right and so that's the problem and I saw that now that I was more informed I saw that there there's a shortage of
high quality teachers and so the teachers I really looked up to were just a handful that was problematic I think I will follow orders if I'm inspired by the person who's leading yes because when I freelance I worked for Kyle Cooper I worked for Garson U and they were with a company called
RGA then later on became imaginary forces and I never met designers in the field that knew more about design and type and design history than these two guys yeah and then I'm like oh this is where I was meant to be yeah because this is one of those things that the type nerds
in the audience are going to understand when Garson told me to types set it in bmbo but not Adobe bembo but Berard uh I don't remember The Foundry name like he wanted that cut of like holy crap right you're that specific and he would whip out an old book and say you see
how how these letters are different redraw the letter so it matches this one the original cut and not that that junk font that everybody's using right now that's what I'm like this I can follow I will I will go uh into shark infested waters with you because you know what you're doing I'm
going to learn a lot that's exactly describing my attitude toward toward most Authority it's like if you're just Authority for the sake of being Authority then we're probably not going to get along very well but if it's like you hold this position and I respect the way that you like who you are
the way that you got it then knowledge you have then I'm totally fine to be under you or to report to you or take orders from you even at some sometimes you know it's just like you got to be able to respect the person that's throwing the orders down or they're just going
to piss me off more than anything else you know Kyle and Garson went to Yale to go to design school they studied under the design Legend Paul Rand they had Arman Hoffman give lectures there like the the people people I saw in books those were their professors yeah yeah so this was ridiculous
so there's a lineage here I'm like wow there knowledge of design their eye for details surpass mine so I'm I'm going I'm going to learn here yeah or I'll die but I'm going to learn and so they taught me a lot so did you feel like you got what you needed to get
out of school that's a loaded question I I I would not be here today if I didn't but that doesn't mean that it's a good idea they could have done more yeah yeah yeah yeah because obviously you're highly you're you run an education company you're highly ingrained in education you believe a lot
in education and you are a master educator yourself so there's a tie to really good formal type education but just not in that context or maybe not for every every person or not that expensive or kind of like what because I I art being one of those things there's you know that plus
80% of other degrees that are just that like you said people are just saddling themselves with excess debt they graduate with a mortgage payment and then they get a job that doesn't allow them to pay anything on that mortgage payment which they can't file bankruptcy to get out of even if that was
an option so where like where do we go from here as as an educator as somebody who like you're not somebody who's just tearing down education and being like Oh everybody should you know go into Plumbing or whatever it's like as an educator yourself what's what's the solution I believe 1,00% in the
power of education and transforming people's lives I don't like necessarily the institutions that are constructed around these things there's a couple of like funny coincidences and I just want to point them out as a person who has no credit going to school is the only place you can get a guaranteed loan by
the government wow isn't that weird think about it I have no credit history and so I can get a loan back by the government and it's the only kind of debt that you can have that's not forgivable through bankruptcy right this is a weird thing now so I'm not specifically pointing my finger
at any specific school but it starts to feel like the administration becomes front of house for banks MH for loan companies notice also once you graduate your loan the student loan that's backed by the government gets sold to a real bank so they can wash their hands interesting that's what literally happens okay
your loan is sold to somebody else because they buy it cuz it's money for them yeah of course of course so it's it's kind of an interesting thing and it's a very interesting thing especially when you consider the tax advantages that institutions have the endowments that they sit on there's so much corruption
that goes on in a lot of these places and it's it's turning well it's dis disillusioning kids who are highly optimistic about their future and they think that they have to go this certain path in order to be successful and they do everything they were told to do and then they wake up
in their mid 20s with a bunch of debt and no job living back in their parents house I was reading I think recently that said something recently said that the most common living arrangement for a man under 35 today is living with their parents still and like maybe some of that is cultural
maybe some of that is generational I don't know all the nuances of it but I got to think part of it is the fact that the cost of tuition has been on like a 10x hockey stick increase since the 1980s and the average salary of a college graduate has been doing nothing but
going down for the last couple of decades it's got to be a factor it's like some like how is how is it not being addressed is my question well we saw what happened in 2008 with the subprime mortgages tearing a financial hole in the Universe imagine what's going to happen when students all
default yeah those are scary times people jumping out of buildings right well and then yeah it just seems like such a half-ass effort by people to fix the problem they're just kind of like oh let's throw a little bit of money at it oh let's talk about it during the election cycle but
we don't really do anything after anything that happens and it's just yeah what are we doing here guys like so here's what I believe I mean I believe in capitalism and not not government to solve these kinds of problems so some capitalists will step in and say you know what I made enough
money I'm going to go invest I'm going to try to develop a program good for everyone good for teachers good for students good for the school I think there's a win-win scenario here I'm not a guy who's like throwing stones and without Solutions like I come with Solutions but when when you understand
how large organizations work then you understand why nothing can ever happen have you ever served on a board before I have not okay so I explain it to people because I know it's easy from the outside it's like well why don't they just change it when when you serve on a board you
understand so boards are elected to help govern an institution organization right and they are financially and legally bound to govern correctly okay so there's a president that is that serves at the whim of the board and the board is a group of people it's it's usually not less than four people and it
could be a whole lot of people but they have different interests and they are usually voluntary board members some of them get paid and they're there because they they have some kind of stature in the industry they have money and so what they do is any risky decision that the board approves they
are liable for just remember that okay so there's a radical idea that's being proed uh proposed by the the president they have to ratify and they have to approve and if they approve it it means if this is the thing that syncs the entire institution organization you are liable you're the board that
ended this whole great thing for 300 years you're the ones who screwed it out interesting so what the board adopts is the mindset of killing ideas yeah because if if you do nothing new it dies that ain't your fault Society changed opportunities changed new threats we couldn't have seen it coming that's why
yeah I've served on a couple served on a couple of boards every time we try to do something it moves at a glacial Pace yeah because it's risky is it just a generational thing we just going to have to let it die down because I feel like this is the first generation that
that's this is the negative effects of higher education are coming out before it was like everybody agreed it was consensus you know where it was just you got to go to school if you want to get a good job you got to go to school and if you don't go to school you'll
be fighting against that lack of degree for the rest of your career now even with tech like massive tech companies coming out and being like Oh yeah you don't need a college degree don't work here anymore you know that happening plus the rise of tuition plus the the lowering of salaries out of
college there's so many things that I think are changing it so do you do you feel like it's just going to be a thing that people are just going to maybe stop recommending at some point or because it seems like the schools still want to continue pushing it and and I'm asking this
almost also as a dad by the way I got two small kids and I think about this stuff all the time CU like I I'm an entrepreneur I have never had a job myself I've always just done stuff and made money and started businesses and done this thing and that thing and whatever
but I also I also know that like that's kind of a personality thing sometimes and maybe my kids don't want to do that maybe they maybe they do want to get a job and maybe they do want to work this type of a life or have this type of a lifestyle or whatever
but I'm just trying to figure out the best decision for them like as a dad to be like well maybe you should consider not going to college but then even for me even to say it out loud is like a I don't know I like screwing up my kid for the rest of
their life because I'm going to encourage them to not go to college and they're going to be like I wish my dad would have encouraged me to go to college cuz now I can't do this path that I wanted you know what I'm saying so I'm asking as a general cultural thing but
also with the context of like I'm I'm looking at it as as a dad as well yeah I I don't know how old school systems are there're hundreds 2000 year old I don't know yeah it's old um some of the historians tell us it's part of the British Empire that our current education
model is built on to create human computers literally this is how it's described where if you if you were fighting in the trenches in Africa and you died they can just pull another human drop them in and they could do the same job again so it's not made for for critical thinking for
taking risks it's just like you're just a cog in the machine yeah and that's what we we've inherited so I don't I don't know like how how old is the the educational system in America couple hundred years yeah 300 how old is America 1776 that's what I was doing in my mind like
I don't know the math I can't figure it out now not what I'm talking to you 250 years something right say 250 years right if it took 250 years to build the system in America it's not going to be two years to take it down right it just doesn't happen like that unless
people like Bezos or mus get involved where they have so much capital and they know how to run big things and they can change it CU one person can change things given the right circumstances right so offer a decision or at least offer a decision or somebody like that could step in and
be like well now you have this or you have this say take path yes and I believe we can have choice at very small scales but a lot has changed in the world since those 200 plus years ago we have the internet we have other Educators who are credible who are using these
open platforms to teach yeah hence um the the institutions can say well maybe you don't need a degree anymore yeah and then what we started to realize is a degree is a poor estimation of a person's knowledge and and skills that can be applied or their character but it's shorthanded we're a lazy
group of people so we're like that piece of paper from that company or that organization says you did it great welcome aboard right the smart organizations like Google make you go through like 20 interviews yeah so in the interview process you either know what you're talking about or you don't and they're very
good at finding Talent yeah and that's now why we're moving away from a piece of paper now if you're in the creative space if you make videos if you do storytelling if you do podcasting you design well we have something to look at we can tell as long as it's not a forgery
we can say like yes you can do it or no you cannot we don't need to know you went anywhere you you could have gone to the school of hard and KNX for all we care we don't even care if you can do it you can do it it's it's clearly a demonstrable
skill right like if you're a brick layer it's like go lay down four lines of bricks or and I can tell how fast you did it and how clean the lines are if it's level if it's messy we know and so we're moving into this place now where you can actually demonstrate and
assess a person much quicker than you could before and it won't be dependent on that piece of paper yeah I hope a lot of that a lot more of that stuff comes out you know schools systems like yours that you've put together you know that that are highly educational that teach real world
skills that people can go and take and and and you know develop it into an entire career or business or whatever even like Jordan Peterson has his school now that he's doing um and bringing in a bunch of professors to do online lectures and they're coming up with some some sort of accreditation
or certific or certification program for that um but yeah I just hope that the I hope that a lot more options start coming out yeah like really soon but to answer your question about what to do with your children how old are your children my son is four okay and my daughter is
just turned three actually you you have plenty of time my oldest is in college okay he's going to Columbia I try to uh say that you don't have to go to school that you don't like and he told me dad I need structure I want the system but I also think he's a
brand name guy so he cares about Brands and Brands mean something to his own identity and so I'm like okayy you do that we've saved money you go wherever you want to go my youngest uh is 17 he's going to finish school this year and he's like I'm going to go to art
school that it's said no you're not you're not going to go to art school there's many other options here's what we're going to do you're going to take a year off school I want you to study Humanities I want I want you to stud art and history and you can live wherever you
want in the world momy to have money for you you want to live in Paris and throw pots do that if you want to go paint with people in Spain go do that just do something with your life first before you go to an art school because you've lived nothing you have nothing
to reflect into the world and that's what you're going to do you're going to regurgitate all that garbage that people are doing online right now now here's a weird thing my son um since he was probably 15 15 and a half he already ran his own business he's filing taxes as a kid
because he's made more money before he turned 18 than I did by the time I was 22 nice the world is different so I'm saying you don't have to fall down any kind of trap yeah uh in the one area that I know which is Art and Design if that's where you want
to go I'll support that but please live some life before you go there because you're going to be like all those other kids who don't know anything you have nothing to reflect I really like that there's no experience there's no there's no culture there's no there's nothing yeah I would rather have you
work in a restaurant uh bus and tabl so you can hear conversations and learn about how people live in cultures and languages and just understand sociology and philosophy and different things then you can put that into your work and you're going to be amazing being a bartender or something like that whatever yeah
um well I I guess I got some time then to think about it I think you have a lot more options yeah but my whole thing is I have a philosophy that doesn't mean you have to buy My Philosophy I'm just going to teach it to you sure and then you do whatever
you want so one boy says I'm going to go to school I'm like go for it m I'll write the checks the other one's like I want to be an artist I'm like here's a different plan think about this please yeah so to completely switch the conversation here um because we're running out
of time I want to make sure I talk about some more practical sides of the business okay um I've heard you speak fairly extensively about pricing um and since I have a larger entrepreneurial crowd um I'd love to hear overarching philosophy and a couple of practical tips or advice that you have for
people that really struggle with that part of their business people who struggle with charging what they're worth or people who tend to constantly be broke but not from a lack of work just from a lack of being able to say no or being able to sell at a higher price or being able
to confidently State what they believe they worth um yeah I guess where did you get that Philosophy from and did it take you a long time to learn it I think in life when you're set off in the right direction everything becomes much easier so what I'm about to tell you came from
a just being very blessed and fortunate to be exactly where I'm supposed to be to do this thing right so I get out of school and I'm able to do freelance work pretty quickly M and it's not great like I'm I'm literally designing Bank brochures where they're paying me 30 bucks an hour
I'm like I'm going to kill myself this is terrible I did not go through this whole program so I can design Bank brochures like trifold brochures what the hell and then I start freelancing and I start to realize what I can do in the at the speed and quality of what I can
do is faster and better than the people who are in the industry and my bosses recognize it whether it's on a freelance basis or with Kevin Jones or somebody else or Kyle's like we want to give you this assignment because we like the way that you look at the world so immediately I
see like I'm not going to charge what they charge because I'm better than them objectively speaking I'm better than them because I can see their output and how hard they're willing to work and the quality of their ideas so it's a combination of a bunch of different things so now I'm in this
mindset where hey I don't have a lot of living expenses I don't buy anything I don't eat anything yeah I'm I'm in a loft it's $1,200 a month and it's wonderful so aside from go and get a like a burrito at the takaria that's all those are all my expenses okay as long
as I can pay off my student loans the minimum payment pay rent I'm good so that gives me a lot of power to say no yes so people come knocking I'm like do you want to nope do you want NOP these terms no no I say politely professionally not for me I got
a bad Vibe about nope even when you were first starting out even like this is early I'm just fresh out of school I'm saying no and you know so what happened was I was freelancing at this place called novacom when I got that call start your business so I told him I gotta
go gone so I'm starting my business now I have no clients you know who called me Kevin Jones novacom imaginary forces all the places i' had been so that's the first lesson for all of you I don't care how old you are wherever you go do the best job you can regardless of
how much you're being paid because what's more important is the reputation you leave behind when you do that and you leave on good terms when you leave gracefully they will give you work so my first clients were all the people that I had previously worked with naturally because I don't know anybody okay
so some art director from novacom Lewis house calls me up and not Lewis house Lewis Hall leis Hall is a different person Lewis Hall calls me up and say hey Chris uh can you design some logos for this this channel I'm like sure it's going to be this amount he's like okay now
that amount that I asked him for was more than what it would cost me to hire someone else to do so I'm like okay I'm going to call my former roommate he comes in like hey you want to do work how much you charge I can't remember what he said let's say it's
30 bucks and I'm like fantastic you're hired so I'm paying him 240 a day I'm probably getting paid 500 bucks yeah yeah and so naturally everybody's like well it's not your work Chris I'm like I know so he could do it to this level through ART Direction literally saying hey let's try these
ideas and I got some sketches and I'll work on some things I could cover the difference but not spend the same amount of time so already as a 22-year-old entrepreneur straight out of school I'm already trying the entrepreneural game and it's working so now I'm getting even within the context of being a
freelancer you're yeah cuz I'm a bastard I'm lazy and I have friends and it works out so whenever there's more opportunities in Your Capacity to do the work you're on the right side of supply and demand yeah and so I was working out of my Loft and they didn't care who did the
work they didn't care they just sent money and we sent work so we just emailed it to them great great and they just kept working yeah and another opportunity that I got was by helping friends from school who wound up becoming pretty successful themselves and so this is a key to life like
you're not in school anymore what you need to do is you need to work with people who are generous and who like to tell other people about things that they like this is very important there are people who are not going to be generous who don't like to tell people because there's a
secret they don't want to give away their secrets yeah so when I worked with my friend from school for no money when they got out of school they started telling other people about us that led to a gig that led to another gig and now we're directing car commercials and it's pretty cool
I'm like how did this happen so already now I'm playing the game of how much can I ask for before they get upset and say no yeah and it turns out a lot it's like a lot more than I thought it was yeah I'll give you an example okay I was freelancing as
a business for Imaginary forces imaginary forces got so much work and they had a very small team and there were not enough to do the work so they would send their overflow work to me now at this point in time Kyle thought it was just me doing all the work he'd send the
work I would do it but there three of us now or four of us at this time and my friends from school Michelle Jesse and Vanessa they would just do the design work and I would go to the meeting I'm like here's the work what do you think he's like fantastic great I
always wondered like how come he doesn't think how can you do so much work as one person with so many different styles he never wondered okay and and his his producer her name is saffron redheaded woman she would call me and she go we got another another job for you I'm like great
it's going to be $700 a day now and she's like what you just charged us 500 and then you changed it to 600 last week why is it $7 or $800 now I'm like because it is because I'm a bastard I say to her if you have a problem with it check with
Kyle never had a problem they just kept paying I just stood my ground so I I and I told everybody at the office I'm going to tell them who's doing the work so I go to another meeting we're doing a bunch of work for him uh maybe it's for a Taco Bell campaign
or something like that and it's a bargain for him it is a bargain even at $800 yeah I show him the work he's like this is good I like this this send me the files make these changes I'm like cool I said I just need to let you know something he's like what
I don't do the work by myself and he goes like what there are a bunch of us was working he's like how many I'm like three of us he goes you've been ghost riding this whole time like yes and I asked him did you ever wonder how I was able to do so
much work in 24 hours I I just thought you were great I'm like are you cool it's like okay just kept giving us more work yeah so I I think what happens here is there's a narrative that's being built in my mind and the narrative is this I try to ask for more
I stood my ground keeps working yeah it keeps working so why would I ever in my life now ask for Less right let's flip the situation oh um yeah I don't know if I should ask for 30 bucks an hour why don't ask for 24 it's easier to say yes and now it's
like the narrative I tell myself now in the Bizarro world is if I charge less they'll say yes and I lose the friction uh but then I don't have enough money I can't hire anybody so now I go down the Vicious Cycle so I just happen to be pointed the right direction with
the right amount of Cockiness and self-belief and the right opportunities that can just keep asking for more and more and they just kept giving me more I give you one more example there's this really critical moment about two years into our business and Kyle says to me from imaginary forces Chris you want
to be a big part of a small thing or small part of a big thing I'm like I'd like to be a small part of a big thing because why don't we just merge your company into ours I'm two years out of school a year and a half and already the preeminent main
title designer in the world who is credited as having Resurgence of main title design the Renaissance he's in the history books and he's only been doing this for a couple years is offering to buy my company and he's like how much you want for your company $1 million he goes what I'm like
I love what I do if you want me to come work for you with my entire team I got to make it worse for them and my partner it's a million dollars he goes that's a lot it's a bargain he didn't say yes later on he's like I should have bought you it
was cheap right and this is where I developed the philosophy the price I give you today will always be the cheapest price wait till you see tomorrow's bill yeah it'll always be more than today yeah there there's a great line in The Alchemist that talks about that um have you read that book
or know the are you talking about Rory southerland's book or the um the the fictional Noel correct yeah um and I don't I'm going completely butcher it but it was Essen exactly what you were just talking about where this the this guy had done something for the the main rich guy in the
in the story and he was like divvying out money to people and he gave him an equal share even though he had done like a smaller amount of work or whatever and the guy that gave it to was like oh you gave me too much you overpaid me or didn't you gave me
too much for what I did or whatever and uh and he basically he said keep it and then take this lesson with you which is BAS basically you know never ask the universe for Less because it might just answer you or something like that it was always like a h that is a
very fair point and to your to your point in talking about that like it it puts you in that negative spiral where you start then start then you start believing you're only worth $24 an hour you're not really worth the $30 an hour because that's what people say yes to and then you
can't afford to hire people so you just have to do all the work so now you're over worked and you're underpaid just because you didn't just go ask for what you thought might have been just a little bit more and then the standing your ground thing too is like that's the difference just
between objections and complaints you know some I think a lot of people instantly go to lowering prices as soon as they present price when they encounter any friction at all when in reality a lot of times it's not a real objection it's just she had a little bit of sticker shock to be
like wait wouldn't wasn't it just $600 yes well why is it 700 because that's what it is um all right and then they just keep writing the checks to you every week it wasn't that easy but I would just say you know sure sure there's a lot more phone calls are made I'm
sure somebody slammed the phone but I still got my check yeah there's a lot of friction a lot more friction than what I just presented however it is not even just it's not them just saying like no that's not enough yeah you know it's just sometimes you got to stand your ground and
know know what you're worth I just I do want to say this because I I know some people are going to listen to this like you mother fer you crazy cocky you delusional this will never work I'm going to tell you the story from the other side now okay okay we're working on
this job for a national um baked goods company let's just say huge uh six figure job and we're having trouble executing on this idea we sold them an idea that we brought in teams of experts and they just couldn't do we had seven people working on doing a test that the clients and
we we're ashamed of showing the test it's not right and so I'm I'm scrambling my team is desperate it's not even my gig one of my guys is directing the job and I'm I'm making phone calls I find this guy I find this guy and he's a particle specialist okay he does particle
simulations like you know in Roland emer's film The Day After Tomorrow and buildings are collapsing and tornadoes are ring through and that there's like tile wave that's not water those are particles some genus guy or gal is in there programming and just running simulations so that it looks like water knocking over cars
cuz you can't animate that stuff you can't so I get this guy's name name and number his name is rift dagger super interesting guy I'm calling him so a dope name Rift dagger dude come on guys Rift dagger made that yeah like RI and Winkle and and then Jack the Ripper riff dagger
is this guy and I call him I'm like um hey we're having some problems with this job and he goes let me guess and he asked every single freaking problem that we had I'm like oh my God please tell me you're available yeah right here's what he said I bet you have a
whole team and they're used to working with large pipelines with technical directors to solve all their problems and it's taking too long to get a result and they're just saying they need this and that more render power and they just give me a lot of reasons that right I'm like oh my God
this are you here are you in the room I'm like yes that's the problem that is the freaking problem okay he goes I'll tell you what don't pay me anything I'm going run a test you look at the test it'll be in your box in two hours I'm like what the fudge there's
no way you could do this in two hours I didn't say that loud yeah yeah so I wait and here's the file I'm like oh um this isn't working for me and he go okay sit there hold on another follow appears I'm like how is he doing this yeah we have a team
of seven or eight people that takes three days to turn around one test wow he's doing this and get this he's like I'm sorry I'm I'm not uh I can't really hear you right now I'm at my mechanics I'm in the auto shop right now I'm like he's like not even in front
of he's not even in front of his computer and he's doing this do you know how he's doing this and this just like blew my mind he was using his Android or his iPhone to remote log to his desktop which is connected to a mass massive computer render farm he was instructing it
with code what to do so he's like okay change parameters and because he's a math physics computer guy he's not using software it's his own thing wow and so it's highly optimized he's like they're using too many particles and they're not putting a boundary I'm like I don't know but this is working
yeah so he goes what do you want to do I said I need to sleep on this next day I wake up I'm like hey I think I found our guy I run to the team look at this and like when he do this I'm like yesterday when between coffee breaks I think
I don't know and like I think we need to go with this guy and so this is crazy we fired the entire team wow we just send them all packing like it's not working it's not working because we're spending a lot of money each one of those people $700 $900 a day $400
we're just spending so much money we're spending thousands of dollars a day getting nothing done giving our clients nothing good to look at this guy's doing tests like instantly so I ask him how much is it how much do you charge he goes it's $1,800 a day I'm like wow okay I've never
paid anybody $1,800 a day at that point I was like this is ridiculous you're hired I go into my producers office I said this is our guy he's like who's your guy riff dagger man riff dagger isy don't you know who riff is yeah right he works on day after tomorrow and they're
like how much is he it's 1,800 bucks and they're policy people they're like we've never paid anybody $1,800 yeah I said what did it cost for all those people $4,500 yeah he did this in hours we need to hire this guy this is a long funny story to tell you I'm on the
other side making a case for paying a guy that an amount of an OB seen amount of money that I've never paid before because they're that good M and he knew he was that good yeah which is why he did the work for free first well he was no he was confident as
hell that's what I'm saying he was just like if you don't like this no exactly nothing on me exactly but you're probably going to hire me like at this point you know when you know you know yeah right and he knew he's that good so I'm not telling you like just from take
it from me as the seller of goods I'm also telling you take it from me as the buyer of and you were happy to pay it that that's I think that's the thing that that screws people in their mind is that they whenever they put a higher dollar amount they they carry their
baggage of their poor relationship with money into the mind of the buyer and they just kind of automatically assume that like hey maybe you probably don't want to pay this because I've never paid this and it's just it's just not true it's just money is just the means of exchange it's just the
thing that you trade for value and if the value that you're providing is really solving a problem that they're experiencing then it is worth paying the money that they're paying and they're happy to pay the money to get the problem solved and I think that's that like really screws people people's mind sometimes
they're like they think that they're almost like taking advantage of somebody by raising their prices or by sticking by their price or whatever and it's like a lot of times it's just you're just it's just not true you're you're you're casting your own view of this of the situation onto the other party
without giving thought to how how hard it was for them to solve this problem to begin with there's a word for it it's called projection you take your life values your sense of selfworth and you project it onto other people when we know that no two people think the same thing yeah you
take your poor relationship with money your poor evaluation of time and value and you project it onto the person sitting in front of you so if riff had an unhealthy attitude about his own life in his own circumstance he would have said $400 Chris I'm like done yeah when when in our world
we were spending so much money what what you don't understand too unless you've worked in visual effects the seven or eight people that we had working on this project I had to rent seven or eight supercomputers I had to hire an IT team to set them up I had to rent software to
run this thing and to buy these not buy rent these render blades wow in the cloud and in the back room we just returned off of it we're like we're canceling all of it we don't need this we got the the machine here rff and he did it yeah he did it now
riff is a character I mean I'm not saying like he was perfect he's an awesome human being but there's a price to pay for his genius because when I met him I'm like yo you're 45 he's like dude I'm 28 I'm like oh my God there's a price to pay there's a price
to pay it it aged him I'm like wow he goes I know bro you you are much older than me and you look younger than me I'm like yeah because you're you're burning candle from both ends yeah which is like a line from like um from Blade Runner rutka Hower you know the
the the candle that burns twice as bright Burns twice as fast the Tyrell Corporation so good um okay so you I want to wrap up the story here so you mentioned earlier this company ran from 2005 to 2018 2019 is this 1995 1995 sorry yes 1995 to so 25ish years and the reason
that it stopped was that you were getting too heavily involved in education essent and your team was like hey maybe we should stop doing all this other work and we should just really go double down on this piece is that correct is that yeah more or less it was a question of Chris
what do you want to do yeah does this still excite you I'm like it doesn't excite me does it excite you like it doesn't excite us either let's all go over here let's leave the Golden Goose and let's jump on the pirate ship and see what happens so how did the education begin
then what do you mean like you got to that point did up to that point you were already doing education yes I'm running two companies in parallel correct so I'm saying like what made you go I should start teaching this stuff at the very beginning yes like the beginning of the education company
oh it was because one of my friends uh from Art Center said hey I know you want to be an educator because I had been teaching for 15 years at that point But at the private art schools oh go people don't know that so I'll explain it a little bit so his his
name is Jose caber and he comes over to me and he's like I know you're interested in education cuz he had seen some posts i' had been making about running workshops he goes I've been running an education company I know how to do this let's join forces we partnered up we started this
company called the school and we ran the school for two and a half years together until we couldn't run it together I'm like I got to break up with you he's like okay cool we separated I started the future yeah and and he's the one who got me into going onto YouTube and
creating information products and moving away from a one to few to one to many model okay and I'm an I'm an operator so I'm like let's go I can make this work better and fashion let's keep going and he was like H I don't like the way this is going I'm like okay
I think we need to separate then right so then the future now is as I understand it and correct me from wrong is an education platform that helps people do the thing that fires them up for a living essentially it's not like it's not like a design school it's it it is it's
hard to put uh one label around it okay what we do is we look for gaps what's the Gap in the market okay and we try to fill those gaps so in the beginning we thought it was design oriented courses so we did typography we did user experience design things like that and
people would buy those products it's fantastic it's working and then we saw like wait a minute if you know how to do a skill but you don't how to sell a skill what's the point so then we saw a gap in the business part of it and we wanted to go and cover
that so we started teaching negotiations sales pricing those kinds of Concepts and then that started to take off and that's what people now know us for gotcha okay so I know there's a bunch of internet trolls out there like uh first of all like this kid don't know how to do anything I
bet you he's never done anything like I'm not a kid I'm 51 years old I've run a company longer than you've been alive that company has grossed over $80 million the second company is on its way to to doing that too so I do know something and the thing that most people don't
know is that I taught at the private art schools for 15 years before I even made freaking video on YouTube yeah yeah so when you see me like doing whiteboards and like explaining Concepts there's a reason why I know how to do that cuz I put in the Reps yeah it built every
skill along the way along the journey yeah I mean if you're working with eight students in a classroom for five hours you either get good or you go home yeah right because they'll fire you right and you won't enjoy it yeah it it's not fun to do something you suck at for extended
periods of time without getting better at it yeah I'm speaking from personal yes for sure um okay so so now the future is 100% what you focus on so you basically were like all right well let's go ahead and shut down this part was that a difficult decision after doing it for 25
years it it was a difficult decision for about 24 hours and then it wasn't really okay so no like morning period of like that's you know goodbye to my my child my my business child here you know you would think that it would be more painful and if if I had to shut
down blind as a company without this other thing I'm super excited about I think I would have to mourn I would probably feel like I'm a failure like I couldn't make it last forever um I couldn't adapt to the market forces and be current and relevant to the industry I would probably feel
that I'm not going to lie to you yeah but I don't know howse to say this but it's like if you have a beat up car but you got a better cooler car that's the newer model like okay you serve it's your purpose thank you I'm moving on I'm ready to go in
the new car now the new car has has bigger wheels and a bigger engine and it's electric or whatever it's like let's go yeah and so we moved over and immediately after we said we're not going to take on any more client work our one of our favorite clients on the best project
that we could ever hope for a video game company said hey we want you to work on this commercial and that was the true test words are cheap yeah until you have to actually lose something and sacrifice something it's just words right it's easy if you're going out a business like we're not
going to take on client work client work anymore but when we say internally we're not going to take on client work and one of our favorite clients calls us up and it's like you know I'll tell you it's Xbox we had this big launch we love working with you guys it's more Xbox
work normally who I had to turn to my creative director Matthew and say we're gonna turn this down right goes yeah and that surprised me that he said yes yes because you know when you work 10 15 years to get to this point in which Xbox will call you to do a project
we're both Gamers yeah this is a dream job it's like I could either work on Marvel Comics UFC or Xbox and I'm be really really happy for the rest of my life and they put a big number in front of us and they're like it's your job to lose it's yours you want
it and we're like No And and when he said no I'm like really okay it's a $400,000 job got to really believe in the new in the new Mission I mean nowhere in my life is $400,000 an insignificant amount of money sure and then we said no they tried to convince us in
many different ways and then they came back with an even bigger job I'm like no the second no was even easier despite the budget even being bigger yeah we're like no so then they offer to buy the company it didn't work out but oh my God would have been good money for me
you mean you want to buy something I don't use it anymore yeah fantastic for a lot of money yeah that sounds like a good deal s figures yeah sign here I blame Matthew but that's another story for that today oh well listen D this has been an awesome conversation I appreciate you coming
on I got one final question for before we wrap up um this is a question I've asked hundreds of times now at this point on the show um and I'm always curious to hear the perspective from somebody like you who has acquired accumulated a ton of knowledge in a lot of different verticals
but also has a lot of really great relationships and people who you've depended on on throughout your career to get to where you are now so who you know or what you know which of those two is more important in life and why it's clearly who you know for a lot of different
reasons it's easy to learn it's not so easy to find the right people to help fill in the gaps the barrier yeah and I think we'd be a$ hundred million doll company if we knew the right people but we're not yeah we're like four or5 million company right now
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