How Embracing Neurodiversity Sparked Creativity & Entrepreneurship | Chris Williams Story

This episode of Hustle Zone, hosted by Ryan Perez, features Christian “Zabo” Williams — founder of The Visual Company (also referred to as VZ Co), a photo, cinema, and creative shop based in Hartford, Connecticut that Williams said was barely a week old at the time of the conversation. What starts as a lighthearted intro — Ryan admitting he mispronounced the guest’s last name and joking about his own dyslexia — turns into one of the more introspective conversations the show has featured, with both host and guest tracing how growing up different shaped how they build businesses today.

Williams was homeschooled for most of his childhood, raised by two entrepreneurial parents: his mother was the creative director of a New York City agency working with brands like AMX and PepsiCo, and his father was a marketing copywriter. Williams describes sitting in conference rooms with a coloring book as a kid, absorbing the language of business meetings without necessarily following every word. He calls it his real classroom — and jokes that his first “non-official internship” happened at age five.

That upbringing collided with a brief stint in public school, which Williams says he failed entirely — while simultaneously running an after-hours school store, marking up candy bars and pencils threefold and selling gum on the side. His entrepreneurial streak started even earlier: a lemonade stand at age seven, run as a cross-promotional “joint venture” with two neighbors lined up along the street, and by age twelve he had launched buildpaperairplanes.com, a subscription site and forum community teaching kids to build paper airplanes, built together with his father.

Much of the conversation centers on what Williams calls being “stuck in his own head.” He talks about studying psychology from a young age — comparing it to learning martial arts, but for the mind rather than the body — as a way to understand himself and the people around him. He and Ryan both describe feeling isolated as kids: Ryan ties it to being dyslexic and often unable to communicate what he was thinking, while Williams says he was almost always trying to find a place to belong but rarely felt welcomed. Both agree the isolation had an upside — it created space to build.

Williams is candid about the flip side of that intensity: years of what he calls self-sabotage, describing cycles of starting something and abandoning it — sometimes within hours, sometimes after a year — until he says he finally accepted “I’m a hot mess,” unable to stay fully present in a single conversation without his mind jumping several steps ahead. That admission leads to the episode’s most quotable line, when Williams describes the classic entrepreneur as “a chronically unemployable delusional narcissist” — a description he says came only after learning, fairly recently, to actually stop and listen to people around him rather than staying locked in his own head.

The episode also works through two audience questions. Anthony Davis asks how Williams got people to take him seriously as a young entrepreneur; Williams says it comes down to genuinely knowing what you bring to the table and how well you can connect your vision to a client’s, rather than “faking it till you make it.” A viewer named Crystal Day (also heard as Crystal Chief) asks what advice to give high-school-age natural leaders who feel pressured to be followers; Williams points to self-awareness as the core answer, while Ryan adds his own experience of learning the difference between being a controlling manager and being a genuine team player.

The show closes with a rapid-fire round — Williams names ice cream and New York cheesecake (with a specific craving for a particular style) as his favorite desserts despite being vegan, says his musical taste depends entirely on lyrical quality rather than genre, and when asked what he’d change about his past with a magic wand, says he wouldn’t change anything, because everything led him to exactly where he is now. Williams can be found on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook at @cswalive, with The Visual Company at @VZCo and vz.co.

As always, Ryan closes out with Hustle Zone housekeeping — a new t-shirt line at hustlezone.clo, a magazine launching soon, and thanks to the regulars tuning in live for another blab-hosted episode.