Chris Do, Founder & CEO of The Futur
Today, my guest is Chris Do, an Emmy award-winning designer, director, CEO and Chief Strategist of Blind and the Founder of The Futur, an online education platform with the mission of teaching 1 billion people how to make a living doing what they love.
He currently serves as the Chairman of the board for the SPJA, and as an advisor to Saleshood. Chris has also served as an Advisory Board Member for AIGA/LA, Emmys Motion & Title Design Peer Group, Otis Board of Governors, Santa Monica College and Woodbury University.Chris holds a bfa in graphic design from Art Center College of Design.
In this candid conversation, Chris shared the real stories behind his struggle with severe introversion, his transition from commercial director to online educator, and his mission to teach creatives the business skills they desperately need.
1. The Loud Introvert. Chris described himself as a “loud introvert” who used to experience such severe stage fright that he would lose sleep, drop weight, and hyperventilate before public speaking events. After trying failed techniques like power posing and vocal exercises, he finally found the cure through a video of a Chinese monk his wife showed him. He realized that shifting his mindset from wanting to “sound smart” to simply focusing on serving and wishing well-being upon others completely alleviated his paralyzing anxiety.
2. The Bruce Banner Dilemma. For years, Chris felt like he was living a dual life akin to the Incredible Hulk and Bruce Banner. While making television commercials for a living was financially rewarding, it left his life stagnant and unfulfilled, whereas his true passion—teaching at the Art Center—filled his creative soul but paid incredibly poorly. He finally found a way to merge these two worlds and make a living doing what he loved when a former classmate convinced him to start making educational YouTube videos in 2014.
3. The Business of Design. Although his online business started slow—making only $18,000 in its first year—he eventually grew it into a $4.5 million revenue machine by discovering exactly what his audience craved. He realized that viewers weren’t actually hungry for traditional design tutorials; they desperately needed to learn the “boring” business aspects of being a creative, such as running a profitable studio and negotiating contracts. This was proven by his massively viral video about pricing logo designs, which features an unscripted, highly relatable roleplay of Chris handling a frustratingly difficult “client”.
4. The Conversation Continues. Unlike many creators who post a video and walk away, Chris views publishing content as just the beginning of the conversation. He actively mines his comment section to find where his audience is confused, struggling, or disagreeing, using those exact insights to figure out what to research and explain next. By employing a Socratic approach and visually diagramming complex problems to make them easy to digest, his ultimate mission is to help a billion people across the globe uniquely tap into their gifts and make a living doing what they love.
