New ‘Lego Masters’ Christopher and Robert Treated the Competition Like a Startup
‘Lego Masters’ season four winners Christopher Lee (left) and Robert Zhang. Photo courtesy Tom Griscom/FOX.
As with the previous three seasons of Lego Masters on FOX, I watched season four — which concluded last week — with rapt attention.
Growing up, Lego was my deepest passion.
When I was home for a family gathering while in college, my cousin’s son destroyed a castle I built as a high school senior — a seminal moment on the path to when I finally put my bricks down for good. (Thankfully, in college the guitar called to me, and I’ve used it as a building tool ever since.)
Here I am working on a Lego city as a child:
Watching Lego Masters now as a business owner, the season four team that would go on to win — Christopher Lee and Robert Zhang — captured my interest in an entrepreneurial sense from episode two. They seemed like a very strong team, and their products — their per-round Lego builds — spoke for themselves.
Here are five ways that Christopher and Robert used a startup-founder mentality to win Lego Masters season four:
They dressed for success. With the play atmosphere in the studio where FOX records the show, it’s rare for a team to have both its members wear suit jackets and dress pants. Christopher and Robert wore them — for every challenge.
They planned and delegated exceptionally well. This is where their longstanding prior friendship, and even being business partners, really helped them get a leg up. There was only one episode where they needed to scrap their original plan and start over with a new vision for their build. Once they were on a glide path, it was inspiring to see them build large pieces separately, and then combine them in the last few hours of the time remaining.
They understood the value of, and budgeted ample time for, product testing. A huge component of Christopher and Robert’s victories was pushing the envelope, compared to past-season builds, when it came to their models’ size and complexity — and for the latter, especially when Technic bricks and motors were involved. Over and over again in season four, we saw Christopher and Robert celebrate key testing milestones with smiles and hugs, at the same time that many of their competitors struggled to metaphorically — and sometimes literally — put the tracks ahead of the moving train in the final hours of a challenge.
They were unabashed market researchers. I delighted in the episodes — several, not just one — where Christopher wandered from their build table to check out what other teams were building. In past seasons, some team members would steal a look at other teams’ builds. But none have spent as much time only one or two feet away from a competitor’s project as Christopher did. Instead of trash talking, he asked competitors innocent-seeming questions about their builds — earning their trust as he meticulously took in data about how his team could crush them when it came time for evaluation by judges (“brick masters”) Amy Corbett and Jamie Berard.
They created compelling stories customized to their target audience. Along with #3, I think this was the co-key factor that led to Christopher and Robert clinching victory in the finale episode. What trumps raw impressiveness in a Lego build? Storytelling — that not only invites a person to play with the build, but to disassemble it to create something else that inspires. Christopher and Robert understood better than any other team this season that at the end of the day, their key audience demo — VCs to a startup founder, if you will — were brick masters Amy and Jamie; and that they care about an amazing story above all else. Christopher often took the lead when it came time to explain the story behind each of their builds to the judges — and he clearly took time to memorize and internalize it so that it could be conveyed with maximum thought and passion at each judging.
If the competition was a business, what outcomes did Christopher and Robert achieve?
You can make the case that the pair formed a successful startup as a result of their time on the show. They achieved the following, which is a lot more over the long term than even many other past winners:
The challenge-winning off road vehicle they built for episode 8 will be featured in a future Lego video game
Their finale-winning airplane build — the largest ever so far for width and depth — will be both placed in Lego’s flagship store in New York City and turned into a Lego set for purchase
They split a $100,000 cash prize
If you haven’t seen Lego Masters, I hope this post entices you to start binging it.
It’s a fun, thought provoking, family friendly show. And it will be back for season five in 2024 according to IMDb.
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