Why Think Radio Is a Zebra, Not a Unicorn

A few years ago at SXSW, a Dutch festival-wristband executive asked me a simple question: "Can you make it light up?" He was talking about Blendology, the tap-to-connect conference badge system — badges that swapped contact details when two people tapped their badges as well as shaking hands (it's very good!). The question didn't result in a design-change to the conference badges. But it did become the seed of Think Radio.

With a PhD in electronics (Imperial College, London), and a career spent mostly inside startups building embedded hardware, that seed became Z-RAY: wireless DMX lighting built so a show doesn't need trailing cable across a stage, or a mains socket within reach of every fixture. Or, in fact, any mains electricity at all.

Three things I actually know

Z-RAY and STATION-X are built around the areas in which I can claim some depth:

• Radio communications — making wireless DMX control fast and reliable under real interference, the accidental kind (a venue full of other 2.4GHz traffic) and the deliberate kind, which is why the link is encrypted, not just paired.
• Power supply design — USB-C Power Delivery, power-efficiency, and a power-path architecture that decides, moment to moment, whether a unit is charging, running, or both, so battery life survives at least one full show (and probably quite a bit more) - rather than not even getting you past a rehearsal. Not a drop of that battery-power is wasted.
• UI/UX design — I was fortunate enough to work at Psion during their golden-age, and the high-water mark of handheld interface design, and I've carried their best ideas — including that any interruption should be recoverable with zero memory burden — directly into STATION-X's rotary selector and Z-RAY's always-on display.

Read the full engineering story behind each of these in the companion sections here in LEARN.

Why "zebra," not "unicorn"

Unicorns are what venture capital spends its time hunting for: the rare companies that post extreme valuations. Zebras are real. They're profitable and good for the people and environment around them — not one traded off against the other — and they tend to look out for each other rather than compete to the death.

Think Radio aims to be a zebra. It's built without outside investors, which is slower and means it's funded through bootstrapping, but it also means no one's pushing expedient (i.e. poor) engineering decisions that no-one wants to see in their product. Every call Think Radio has made, including the small ones — what we ship, what we don't, who we work with — gets weighed against engineering excellence, not just against revenue.

Where you'll find me

Think Radio is essentially self-contained, not out-sourced: engineering, manufacturing decisions, marketing, this website, all of it. If you've got a technical question the spec sheets don't answer, or you just want to talk through whether Z-RAY fits your rig, Think Radio can provide those answers.

— Dr Dominik Ostrowski, MIET
Founder and embedded-systems engineer, Think Radio
Connect on LinkedIn

FAQ

Who designs and builds Z-RAY?
Z-RAY and its STATION-X controller are designed in-house by Think Radio's founder, Dr Dominik Ostrowski (PhD, Imperial College London; MIET), an embedded-systems and RF engineer - that's got to the point where he can't quite remember how many gadgets he's brought to life.

Is Think Radio backed by investors?
No. Think Radio is bootstrapping rather than venture-backed — part of why it's run as a "zebra" business, built to be profitable and responsible rather than optimised purely for rapid growth.

What does "zebra, not unicorn" mean?
It's a distinction between startups chasing rare, extreme valuations ("unicorns") and businesses built to be genuinely profitable while also being good for the people and environment around them ("zebras") — without treating the two as a trade-off.