I've Been Training My Own Competition

I'm Kevin Thai, a headshot and event photographer based in Malden, working across Boston. Before you book a session or an event, here's a story that says more about how I work than a service page can.

In December 2024 I started a mentorship community, reluctantly, at the encouragement of my own business mentors. Nine months later, at Startup Boston Week 2025, I spent five thousand dollars out of pocket to put a dozen of those mentees to work, and told them to keep every dollar they made.

At Startup Boston Week 2024, I volunteered around 60 hours by myself. Eight of those went to headshots, a chunk to documenting half the panels, and the rest to running a real-time delivery system for over 360 attendees, speakers, and volunteers. By the end of the week I'd delivered nearly 4,000 images, often within seconds of taking them.

It was the most physically exhausting, logistically demanding, and professionally fulfilling event I'd covered. It was also unsustainable, and I knew it.

By September 2025, I brought a team of nearly a dozen photographers to Startup Boston Week. Most of them were early-stage creatives I'd been mentoring for nine months by then, people I'd been reluctant to call myself a mentor to. Being someone's mentor isn't just sharing what you know. It means showing up emotionally and committing to someone's growth even when it's inconvenient, messy, or slow.

Together we captured and delivered over 13,000 images in real time, to more than 1,000 attendees, speakers, and volunteers, across roughly 300 hours on site.

The event cost me about $5,000 out of pocket. Travel, food, gear rentals, logistics. After covering those costs, every dollar my mentees earned that week was theirs to keep.

Some of them didn't take a dollar at all. A few volunteered their time and treated the coaching itself as the payment. Evan Schmidt, one of the photographers I've mentored, put it this way: "Kevin has taken huge amounts of time to support my individual and business growth. He's a community builder, not just an outstanding photographer."

After nearly every session, we sat down and reviewed the images together. What worked, where there was room to grow, lighting decisions, composition choices, workflow bottlenecks, and the harder question of when human connection matters more than technical perfection.

One message sat at the center of it: be human. Don't just take pictures. Be the reason someone smiles. Be the reason someone feels seen. Give people permission to enjoy themselves, then be ready to catch that moment when it shows up.

Simon Sinek writes about worthy rivals in "The Infinite Game." Not a competitor you're trying to beat, someone whose strengths reveal your own weaknesses, someone worth studying because they're good at something you're not.

I didn't set out to build my own worthy rivals. That's what's happening anyway. The photographers I've mentored are getting better. Some of them will get better than me at things I'm not. The old way of thinking says that should feel like a threat.

It doesn't. As they improve, they buy better gear and go full time. We stop being one photographer and a dozen people learning from him, and start being a network that can take on jobs neither of us could handle alone, or cover the ones I'm too busy for.

In 2025, I paid out $20,000 in jobs to people I've mentored. In 2026 so far, another $14,000.

That's not generosity. It's what happens when you stop keeping score.

If you're hiring a photographer for a headshot session or an event, this is the part that actually matters: someone who trains people instead of guarding turf is someone who shows up for your event fully, not protecting some edge over the person next to him. That's the same care that goes into a headshot session or a five-day conference. Nothing about how I work changes when the camera's pointed at you instead of at someone I'm training.

To every photographer who gave their time, their effort, and sometimes just their trust: I'm proud of you.