We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Elaine Huang. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Elaine below.
Hi Elaine, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?
I’ve been told that I’m resilient more than a few times, and I sometimes think back of my life experience to see where I got that from. First off, I would say that it may have stemmed from my parents and growing up without the most normal childhood. Both my parents immigrated here from China to San Francisco, not knowing a word of English. We didn’t have much money or resources, so I had to grow up real fast. Often times both my parents were gone at work or elsewhere, and I stayed home alone since I was 5. I walked myself to and from school, took care of myself most of the time, and kept that independence as I grew up. I saw a lot of things that maybe most children didn’t see, but that helped me learn to be independent, take care of myself, and also have a sense of duty for others. Seeing how my parents suffered with their language barrier, dealing with racism when trying to start businesses, and getting judged by those around us really angered me. I grew up seeing many things that were unfair within my family, the community, and society. I watched my dad start multiple businesses with the attitude of chasing the American Dream and trying to provide for his family, despite his lack of resources and language barrier. Those businesses weren’t always successful, and we lost a lot from those attempts, but he always stayed generous and gave more than he got. He was not the typical Chinese man that cared about stability, but had a very entrepreneurial spirit instead. His fighting spirit never died, literally even on his deathbed when he coded 3 times and still came back to life despite all the odds and what the hospital staff told us. He finally left this physical word recently, but I know that his spirit lives within me and I have always learned from him by example. Despite the internal need to succeed, rebellious tendencies and desire to prove the doubters wrong, I also knew that I wanted to walk the path less taken and change how my culture or being a woman in my culture is “supposed to be”.
I also built up extremely thick skin through practice sometime in college. I did an internship with College Works where I had to go door to door literally every single day offering people free estimates, which lead to running a house painting business from start to finish. I had many doors slammed in my face, got cursed out, dealt with a ton of headaches, but also met some of the most amazing people ever. I realized that everyone has a story, has something they are going through, and has a need. When they said no to me, I learned that out was just a no in the moment and that was okay. When I finally got through the NO’s to get to the YES’s, they meant that much more. I enjoyed the reward of winning something or someone over with time, persistence, and just showing them what I could do and who I am. I carried the resilience of my childhood, life’s lemons, and my work experiences over to Neon Owl and everything I do here now.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
Neon Owl is a music community with a philanthropic focus, as well as an artist development platform. I would say we’re a little different than other companies because we wear many hats. On one end, we started off curating content, sharing stories of artists, entrepreneurs and creators in the music space. We often gravitate towards content, people, and stories that help spread awareness for different causes that people can stand behind. Whether it’s animal rescues, mental health, or different things happening in the world, we make an effort to shed light on organizations that we can all come together to support. Being festival goers and living in a very privileged place, we try to help those that are a little less fortunate than us, whether that be through our content, activations, shows and community events that often have a charity component tied to it. https://neonowl.co
We also host a series of events called Open Door Sessions, both virtually and across the states in different cities such as: Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Miami, Las Vegas, Denver, Atlanta, and more. Open Door Sessions is a series of events curated to bring the music community together while helping artists get discovered, heard, and signed. Since its inception, we have helped countless artists get heard, booked and signed. On top of that, we also creative collaborations among artists, business professionals, brands, and collectives from all over the world. We’ve also partners with incredible festivals and brands like Groove Cruise, Create Music Group, Icon Collective, InvAsian, Space Yacht, Anjunabeats, 1015 Folsom, The Midway SF, YOLO Nightclub, Larimer Lounge, District Atlanta and more to foster community. We’ve had artists like Habstrakt, BIJOU, Trivecta, Blanke, MaRLo, Andrew Rayel, Blastoyz, Gem & Tauri, Haliene, GENIX, Sacha Robotti, Gene Farris, BEAUZ, Nostalgix, and many more to share their knowledge with aspiring artists.
Lastly, we launched The Mastermind program back in late 2021 to help some of the more serious artists that come through our events to take their careers to the next level. We focus on goal setting, accountability, leverage the power of likeminded people to achieve goals faster. We also help these artists navigate the music space, as it can be quite the mystery between music business, entertainment law, pitching yourself, branding, to getting your music in front of the right people. At The Mastermind, we also bring in key industry speakers to share their experiences, answer questions, while listening to and feed backing demos every single week. We have kept this program pretty intimate up to date, because we also wanted to see what the success of the artists would be. Having done this for over two and a half years, we have a proven track record and may soon open it up to more applicants. On top of just fostering a very close knit community, the goal is to help discover and build some incredible artists from the early stages of their careers into true success stories.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
Since we spoke on resilience a ton earlier, I would say that this is the TOP quality one must have. Whether you are in the music industry, run any sort of business in any industries, or want to make it as an artist, a leader or someone that just makes a difference… you need to be resilient. If this were easy, anyone would do it and it wouldn’t be a challenge. It’s rare that anything good and lasting ever comes easy. So ask yourself, are you in it for the long haul because the ride is about to be real long with a ton of uphill battles, bruises, and heartbreak. You need to build extremely thick skin, and although challenging at times, not take things too personal. I’m a very emotional person so this is sometimes a challenge for me, but I try not to let anything get to me to the point where I’m too paralyzed to get back up and go at it again. RESILIENCE wins the war!
My friend Jia (6AM Group) talks about a lesson he learned long after he started and saw success with 6AM Group. It was about passion vs. purpose, a topic that comes up often in the entrepreneurial space. His takeaway during one of his interviews (I believe with John Digweed) was that PASSION is great and all, but is nothing without PURPOSE. I have always fully aligned with this belief. A ton of people are passionate about things. You can be passionate about travels, shopping, food, animals and whatever else. However, passion which is essentially an interest in something can only take you so far. But when you pair passion with purpose.. which is your WHY, your meaning in life, what you want to create and leave behind in this world is what’s going to get you out of bed every single day. When you can pursue your purpose in life through something you are passionate about, it will help you endure the toughest of storms and lowest of lows. That is what’s kept me going at Neon Owl and why I’ve never once considered giving up. Success of not, I am living my life purpose through doing the things I am passionate about. I was going through a pretty time about 4-5 years ago right before and during the early stages of the pandemic. It had already been years since I left my 6 figure job at my last company to pursue my passion and purpose, but it was really rough mentally as well as financially. I had been making ends meet while funding Neon Owl with all my coaching and consulting gigs. I had stayed resilient and made it work with different businesses and side hustles. One day during the pandemic, my fiancé told me that I should drop everything else I was doing and 100% focus on Neon Owl. He told me that most people go their entire lives without finding their purpose, and that I had found mine so I owed it to myself to go all in. It was a scary ass time, but I don’t regret it one bit. When theres a will theres a way if it’s something you truly cannot live without.
The third and final quality I would say is important to success and longevity would be to live by: RELATIONSHIPS ARE EVERYTHING. This applies to everything in life, personal or business. In life, everything is about relationships. Whether you’re down in a ditch and need someone to lean on, or it’s time to chat business deals. How you treat others, regardless of what they can offer you, what status they have is very telling about the person you are (and people will see this one way or another). If you value your relationships, they will provide value back. It may not always be linear, and those that you serve and give to may not always reciprocate, but good energy and intentions always has a way of coming back around. How well you treat others, care for others, serve others will come back in the form of karma or may just be brought up in a business conversation. I try to always treat everyone well with respect, a lending hand, an open mind, and remove any ego aside. Someone that you see with not much to offer today may be someone in a high level position tomorrow or someone you may need a favor from. Someone you see as quiet and bashful today may be the biggest superstar tomorrow. Always lean in with open arms and an open heart. It’s a very PLUR approach that I’ve taken in life, even before I started raving and I do believe it’s played a huge part in Neon Owl’s culture over the years.
How can folks who want to work with you connect?
We are always open to more partners, collaborations, allies, and artists to continue this movement of Dance. Give. Inspire. and to expand the community. Although I am a very competitive person, I am mostly competitive with myself and my goals, and not so much with others. Music is truly the universal language that connects us all, and it heals us. I feel that the music industry should do and be the same. Sometimes there may be a lot of competition, comparison, cliques or whatnot happening, but we try to stay away from all of that. I think that when likeminded collectives, brands, and people come together, our impact can only be greater and reach further.
We are always welcoming everyone with open arms. Whether you are an artist, manager, photographer, or aspiring music industry professional, feel free to come to our events both virtual and in person! If you’re a record label, festival, brand, or club that vibes with what we are up to and want to partner, I’d love to chat! For any established artists and industry professionals that want to shed some light on their journey and lessons they’ve learned along the way, we’d love to bring you on as a speaker at either The Mastermind or Open Door Sessions. As for venues and festivals that would love to bring us out to curate more community oriented experiences, we are open to that as well. We’re always looking to expand into new cities and work with more venues to curate events. We’re happy to partner up with other promotion companies, labels, artists and brands that align with our mission. Lastly, if you are simply a hardcore music lover and raver, we’d love to see you at some of our upcoming shows! Peep our website or follow us on socials to find out when the latest events are happening. We also have a growing discord and encourage people to connect there!
https://discord.com/invite/djzuVCU4HK
Contact Info:
- Website: https://neonowl.co
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neonowlco
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NeonOwlCo
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/itselainesworld
- Twitter: https://x.com/neonowlco
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/neonowlco
- Other: Neon Owl’s Discord: https://discord.com/invite/djzuVCU4HK My personal IG: https://www.instagram.com/itselainesworld
Image Credits
Photo credits to: @photosbydutchess @travisinmotion @Tyler-6thelement @saigonphotos
