Eric is the CEO of ShredLights, which manufactures high-performance lights for electric skateboards. ShredLights strives to make their customer’s lives easier, so their lights attach to skateboards (of course!) as well as helmets, backpacks, and onewheel boards. Their goal is to make riders feel safe at night, while still looking trendy. Eric shares more of his entrepreneurial beginnings and business philosophy with us here.

Value is More Important than Hard Work: The Beginning of ShredLights

Eric didn’t always aspire to be an entrepreneur. He was more focused on sports, but this all changed in high school. At the time, Eric had two incomes. One was from a job at a pizza parlor, where he worked extremely hard but only made $8.00 an hour. The other involved perusing thrift stores, where he would purchase, paint, and resell rare Air Jordan shoes on eBay. Eric turned a much higher profit from the latter. “I ended up making about $5,000 selling these Air Jordans,” Eric said, “and learned the valuable lesson that it’s not always about how hard you work, it’s about how much value you can provide.”