"It's like jumping without a parachute
And building a plane before you hit the ground"
Welcome to DawsonCannon.com
Left or Right Brain?
You decide.
Click on stuff!
with a degree in Aerospace Engineering
and a focus in Astronautics
I started an
art company
at 22 years old
I dropped out of
Grad School to
pursue an idea
after being pushed
over an edge
While Self-Funding
via odd jobs, a salvaged Jeep, and
commissioned artwork.
Every dime I made, I invested.
but before all that, I...
2013 - 2017
Founded and fostered a Motorcycle Club for student motorcyclists
which lives on today.
Studied Patents, Copyrights, and Trademarks abroad in the United Kingdom
in a class called "Entrepreneurship for Engineers"
and Interned
fabricating
and assembling
aerospace and medical components;
from turbines to heart pumps
and way before that,
I relentlessly drew.
Pencil to paper: early-aged attempts at Cartooning and Architecture
and led a competition
design team
to inaugural success,
awarding me a scholarship
critical to affording college. (2011)
To be honest, my desire to invent dates back even further.
See my sketches from the late nineties.
It's no secret where my head was at - but it all started with doodles.
fast-forward
For College, I was pointed towards engineering. Doodles alone weren't going to cut it.
I went from nearly flunking Calculus to acing Thermodynamics
In college, before my specialization in
Rocketry and Astronautics,
I was part of an entirely different program;
dual-majoring in both Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering.
But before any of that, I could barely stay afloat. Calculus was one of my first college classes. Unlike my peers who were in for a refresher, I had never even heard of Precalc. Now, I was starting Calc I.
As a first semester freshman,
I failed consecutive midterms
barely at the doorstep of an Engineering education. Things were looking grim.
I knew I couldn't afford to pursue anything but engineering, so I persevered to absorb what I considered to be extremely complicated material, and passed - paving the way for me eventually being able to learn actual Rocket Science.
Academic Highlights
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Most challenging Electives
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rotary wing dynamics
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random signal analysis
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orbital mechanics
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senior thesis: business plan to compete with SpaceX then-unproven booster recovery system
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"mechatronics" taught critical skills for business startups years later
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B.S.E., Astronautical Engineering
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Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering
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consecutive Dean's List student
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STEM GPA: 3.9
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3.3 after factoring in the lame stuff
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Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society
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Accelerated 4+1 Master's Degree program
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Tutoring and Teacher's Aide positions
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Founder and Leader of multiple student orgs
Even with all I learned in college, only a select few things stuck with me as the things I wanted to spend my life doing.
Imagination and Creation, by whatever hands-on means were available, would overlap with one another as the foundation of the businesses I built and run today.
Design, and the process of taking something from concept to reality,
is my bread and butter.
I forged my way through an unfriendly unknown while fighting to stay doing
What I do Best...
Concept Planning
Reverse engineering product ideas from napkin sketches, conversations, and experimentation.
Electrical Coding
Soldering & Circuit building, component selection and testing, hardware programming and integration, and unrelated web developing. I got my first HTML book when I was 12!
CAD Design & Rendering
Highly proficient in 3D drawing:
Dassault SolidWorks,
Autodesk Inventor, Revvit, Fusion360
Blender ®
Graphic Design
Self-taught proficiency in
Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and more
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Logo/Brand design
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Packaging design
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Web asset creation
Product Prototyping
Vacuum forming, mold making & casting, materials selection, 3D Printing, treating, iterating
Video Production
Capturing and editing using Adobe Premiere and After Effects
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Promotional content
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Advertisement creation
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Platform adaptation
I wanted to draw what I would make,
and then go make it.
but every voice around me just told me to go to the career fair and take the first job I was offered.
However, an early internship strongly suggested that I was not compatible with a corporate desk life.
In fact, a notion of such struck chilling fear into my heart.
As graduation loomed, I was swinging for the fences to take the road less travelled.
I was against defaulting to corporate engineering.
My first startup made it nowhere, despite how far I was able to take the prototype - having started it when I was still in school.
Towards that end, I sought the help of
a product development firm,
Level 2 industries
in a final effort to resuscitate it.
My Kind of Place
While uninterested in my business plan
or furthering the product at hand,
they did offer me a job
on the spot.
To work as #4 in a like-minded, four-person company was absolutely surreal.
An outstanding facility, state-of-the art equipment,
and a deep appreciation for entrepreneurship.
Typically apprehensive towards new hires,
my new bosses told me they saw themselves in me.
Due to L2's small size, (3-5 people)
I would have never expected us to serve the clients that we did.
I felt honored to be working on such massive "industrial art" projects for names like
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JLL
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Lyft
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Intel
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Headspace
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Museum of Ice Cream
and I was even more impressed to hear about clients of their past.
This job harbored a welcoming environment for me to work on my ideas in a well-equipped space;
but it also did so much more than that.
Working on their stuff was a whole new ball game, reinforcing prior knowledge and teaching me more than I could ever ask to learn.
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Design techniques & Fabrication tricks
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Exotic Materials
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Organic shapes, unique contours
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Large-scale construction efficiency, simplicity
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Precise, quality craftsmanship
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Custom, large-scale electrical fixtures
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Analog vs. Digital signals and controllers
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Necessary power supplies, hardware selection, safety
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Numerous software for designing light sequences and "shows," and integrating all prior elements.
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the wonders of Shipstation and QuickBooks
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planting seeds for my future endeavors
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After a year of fun projects and learning opportunities,
I had fully pivoted from the prototype that brought me there
to the mass-produced product I would leave with.
It was time to say goodbye.
I would be all alone once again - however more motivated, and more armed, than ever before.
When it came to business, I didn't know most things.
I knew that a 'conventional job' was likely to steer me away from work I actually enjoyed doing. My thought was to instead build a business around what I knew I liked was the only way to guarantee that I continue doing them.
But first, in this many-years process, I would have to become many things that I never planned to.
Supply Chain Logistician
My products contain
multiple components
produced in multiple factories in multiple countries
all needing to merge for seamless assembly and redistribution. I have paid for every mistake and pioneered each success.
Event Planner
From designing fliers and signage, to booth setup, breakdown, and freight, to transportation, accommodations, and all the networking in-between. I've been the sole organizer of my presence at nearly a dozen industry tradeshows.
Warehouse Manager
I've spent hundreds of hours hand-packing and shipping thousands of customer orders from multiple facilities, while juggling stock management of my products and shipping supplies.
Marketing Director
Reckoning with the all-powerful necessities of marketing. Print, video, email, social, metrics, media editing, campaign settings, and beyond. Each as necessary as they are diverse. Crippling me as the absolute furthest thing from my joy or expertise; I can now talk circles on the subject.
Reluctantly.
Bootstrap Accountant
Starting up a business with no loans or investors means that in order to grow, any big payday had to be spent entirely on larger and larger production orders. This meant years of no salary and being personally broke. The vicious cycle implied stagnation to outsiders, and was extremely tough to break out of. Not to mention having to learn liabilities and taxes and all that.
Everything Else
Thousands of hours of packing, cutting, making, counting, cleaning, hand-assembling, quality control, risk mitigation, improvising, elbow grease, callouses, flesh wounds, and know-how.
And in the grandest irony of my life,
I found that the responsibilities of business had their way of completely consuming the few joys I intended to pursue -
just as, in the beginning, I feared a conventional path would.
At one point, despite tremendous efforts, the horizon appeared rather bleak. Regardless of how hard I worked, I faced unrelenting pressure from naysayers close to me.
I found myself spread so painfully thin
that I conducted an
introspective exercise.
Perhaps even more so.
As company growth increased,
the complexity of tasks
exponentialized.
Step 1. Make a list of everything that I was doing on a daily/weekly basis
This included both daily to-do's and on-call responsibilities, such as IT maintenance and customer service.
Step 2. Group each line into "best-fit" / commonly known job titles/positions
typical roles found in a consumer product business
Step 3. Gauge and identify which fields were my heaviest burdens, as well as
why I felt so distraught and overwhelmed all the time.
It finally made sense when I worked out the following:
I was actively doing the work of THIRTEEN completely different professions & career titles.
At any given moment, I was wrestling
13 distinctively separate trains of thought.
Every single task, chore, and meeting called for tangling them all up.
One day, I looked up and realized - I had been at it like this for several years, explaining the countless all-nighters and 130-hour weeks.
My sanity was slipping,
but I held it together in the end.
Every little thing that needed to be done would unfold into a string of different hurdles - all which seemed best suited for a team with a multitude of specialties.
But there was only me.
So...
An experimental era, about 5 years of a sink-or-swim fight, nearly stripped me of my ability to focus on my passions - and in the process, caused me to learn tremendous amounts from fields far and wide.
However, once I got all the kinks ironed out,
I was able to get back to spending time on
what I enjoy doing most.
Illustrating & Painting
I always drew but never painted; the first time I tried it, I started a business around it.
D-I-Y Home Improvement
Enhancing work and living spaces by means that your dad would approve of.
Boarding, Biking, Travelling
and miscellaneous shots of adrenaline.
Automotive Engineering
having the mechanical knowledge to diagnose, repair, and operate most things with an engine and tires.
Interest Research
in cutting-edge fields of Aerospace, Renewables, Astrophysics, and Quantum computing
General Aviation
impatient to do something more with that Aerospace degree, now I'm a Pilot.
So, that's Dawson Cannon.
I'm still building my business, while doing "what I love."
but I still get bored sometimes.
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Institutions have sought me out to teach classes in Autodesk Inventor, as well as most of the Adobe suite; (Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator and After Effects.)
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I have been known to take on work like this. I find fulfilment in watching students build comprehension in subjects that I can help with - and better yet, enjoy.
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Every now and then, someone will approach me with an "invention idea" of their own, however I have yet to come across an "idea person" who has what it takes to get through the hard stuff ...alone.
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While I have had dreadful experiences of people riding my coattails, I am open to deploying my product business model in several more niches, as long as the right person shows up with the right project.
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I first got my start in the commodities business - hoping to intertwine engineering and design with entrepreneurship and independence, while achieving some level of success at it.
Now, I am striving to make my company fully autonomous, with hopes that by the time that I do, my destiny will re-align with the sky, the stars,
and the future of Aerospace.
But until then,
you can check out some more of my links.
Thanks for scrolling -
