Daniel Pon was studying pre-med in the late ’90s and was on track to becoming a doctor — any Asian parent’s delight. But today, the 49-year-old’s office is a 3,000-square-foot warehouse in Bayview filled with power tools, vans loaded with saltwater jugs and glass fish tanks glowing blue under fluorescent bulbs.
“If you are able to create the [aquarium] world,” Pon said. “It’s almost like being a mad scientist, you are playing the ‘creator.’”
Though not a doctor, Pon’s work as an aquarium designer does involve science. On a recent Thursday, for example, he kept an eye on dozens of imported fish under quarantine, monitoring them for diseases like white spots, caused by a parasite that spreads quickly in a tank.
Pon’s work — his company is Ocean Treasures — is on display across the Bay Area, at the dentist’s office, the local dim sum restaurant, even the fan lot at Oracle Park. People want aquariums for all sorts of reasons, Pon said. Some get the idea after watching Tanked, or want to improve the feng shui of their house. Others just have an affinity for the ocean.
Pon, dressed in all black, joked that coral reefs are the only colors he can accept.
“It’s one of the few things nowadays that can quiet the world around you,” Pon said. “Like somebody else could also be overwhelmed with the world, but when they look at their aquarium, they can relax and kind of find peace.”
Pon’s first fish-related job was at a fish store near Duboce and Valencia in 2009, with “absolutely zero training.” There, he learned to service aquariums at people’s homes. The store struggled after six months, and Pon took it over and started providing aquarium services from a cargo container in Dogpatch. Later, he moved to 3rd Street and, in 2015, moved to his current Bayview warehouse.
Ocean Treasures’ main business is maintaining about 75 tanks across the Bay Area, Pon said.
In the first few years, Pon was “a one-man army” and did it all himself. Every two weeks, he inspected aquariums – wiping the algae down, checking the chemistry in the water and making sure all the fish were happy.
After seeing hundreds of tanks and the “different Frankenstein creations people make,” he learned what works and what doesn’t.
Designing a reef tank, Pon said, is like replicating the ocean’s ecosystem — not just fish, but also corals, invertebrates and rocks. “It’s super diverse, filled with life. Even the rocks can be considered alive.”
“It’s the most ridiculous job ever,” he added, measuring a tank’s temperature, lighting and pH levels. “We are like God that sustains life.”
But it’s not without mishaps. Once, Pon built a giant L-shape glass tank only to find it failed to fit through the front door of a house. He had to use a crane to lift the 2,000-pound tank and bring it in through the back door.
“To be a small business owner is just going to be a bunch of moments like that,” he said. “So there’s no more moments left to scare you.”
A week before Christmas, Pon said, thieves broke into the warehouse and made off with the two service vehicles parked inside and all the power tools worth tens of thousands of dollars.
It was a blow, and almost a fatal one, but after taking a step back from the incident and the daily grind, Pon realized he could not go back to a desk job. He has created “something epic,” he said, “carving out a little niche to live in San Francisco that is not tech.”
He remembered an aquarium he installed in an elderly care facility, where tenants told him that gazing at the fish and playing with them was “the light of their day.”
“There’s so much ugliness in the world … designers and artists are the ones consistently planting the world with beauty,” Pon said. “You might not notice it, but it accumulates to something larger.”
