And then came Zihan’s startup debut - lured roommates with restricted stocks and unrestricted caffeine at 2 AM to hammer out iPhone games. Peaked the App Store for one afternoon. Earned enough for Red Bull.

Zihan craved shiny titles, 30+ awards - most earned before he could even legally toast. Back then, trophies opened doors. Now they gather dust; He turns inward, chasing the true self that drowns out claps from the crowd.

The mirror’s in the works, not the words - Zihan revealed himself in what he built, pixels are the Broadway plays, patents are the tell-all betrayals: yelling or whispering truths he is too rehearsed - or too scared - to say.

While rookie designers spam HR with desperate portfolio links for jobs, Zihan went straight to the inbox of Tom Geismar and Sagi Haviv. No one in their right mind thought it’d work, and maybe that’s why it worked.

Flirted with architecture but romance faded as Bauhaus bliss became Byzantine bureaucracy. Lectures, optional. Failing, inevitable. Diploma, secured (barely). A school felt like a cathedral; Zihan needed a garage.

Zihan Chen is an award-winning creative director problem solver and the founder of Point One Lab. He is a designer who likes to code, a developer in empathy mode, and above all, a fever-dreamer who gets things built.

The perfect Saturday for Zihan: dim sum paired with a memoir as layered as the egg tart, followed by ideation and confession put in Notion. Squash at four. By sunset he's 3000 ft airborne, inhaling just like a baby reborn.

In 2023, Zihan founded Point One Lab. Staring at the rental office that arrived fully naked, VOILÀ, bye to the fridge packed with La Croix, he’s thirsty for fizzy uncertainty, not sipping on the illusion of variety.

His childhood pals begged for BB guns; Zihan lobbied for a DSLR. It was the beginning of a lifelong chronic condition - the compulsion to frame reality in rectangles, rather than blow holes through it.

Zihan landed in a Chinese small-town delivery room in ‘96 with twin imperatives: breathe and create. Most consider the first a prerequisite for the second, but he's spent every day since proving it's the other way around.

Zihan’s decade-long career reads less résumé, more Hemingway: ping-ponged between prestigious studios and flameout startups, sweated in both corporate cubicles and townhouse ofuros. Grace under pressure, always.

Zihan was the model student—straight As, a greatest-hits album of tiger-parent ambition from kindergarten to high school graduation. They shipped him to America for college, and the script got ripped in half.

Enter the MFA - Chelsea the lecture hall, Soho the seminar, Brooklyn the dorm. You might have spotted Zihan hauling a 27-inch monitor between WeWorks. Commitment or insanity? In New York, the line’s blurred.