In this series, you will have a chance to get to know each team member of ScanCAD International. To kick this off, get to know Travis!
Originally born in Denver, Colorado, I had the great fortune to grow up in a small mountain town just thirty minutes away from Denver. We had the benefit of being close to nature while also having the ability to travel to Denver on the weekends. My formative years were spent romping around our mountain neighborhood on ATV’s, Tap dancing at a local dance studio, snowboarding, and rewatching the same five movies over and over again (even though we lived on top of a mountain, television reception was surprisingly bad)! My upbringing instilled in me a deep reverence for nature and an ongoing need to feel connected to the natural world around me.
Upon graduating high school, I embarked on a rather circuitous route through college! I initially studied philosophy, switched to social psychology, and finally ended up with two degrees: a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film Studies at CU Boulder. Film school was one of the more profound experiences of my life, though not for the reasons I anticipated. The films we create are a testament to our world-view, to the way we perceive our place in the universe, to our moral code and values, to the way we express love and joy, and the way we experience sadness and loss. My experience with the film program at CU included an incredible amount of films outside of the traditional contemporary Hollywood bubble. We explored films from all eras of cinema and from many different cultures. We dove deeply into films from Russia, Sweden, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, China, Ghana, France, Italy, Spain, Iran, U.K. and more. We explored them as cultural artifacts and lenses through which we could see a distant world more clearly. As a child, I had the incredible opportunity to travel extensively around the world and this process of discovery in film rekindled a deep fire within me for connecting with the infinite manifestations of humanity. We are all reflections and inflections of divinity and it is one of the great joys of my life to explore and connect with that essence.
I completed my degrees and began to build a video production company with a colleague and good friend. This continued for several years, we worked on numerous projects together and achieved international distribution on one of our television shows. At the end of the day though, the thing that excited me about video was not the production process – it was its insight into humanity and its ability to act as a mirror so that we may learn more about ourselves and connect more deeply with each other. All during this journey – I had worked part time at ScanCAD International, managing our service bureau. I decided to leave the video industry and jump full time into ScanCAD. I progressed through our service bureau and stepped into the product manager role. This gave me the opportunity to not only work with the software, but collaborate with our customers and our development team to continue to enhance and evolve our product lines.
After a few years, I pursued an Executive Masters in Business Administration, supported by ScanCAD – and what an amazing experience this was. My education took the foundations I had been working on and helped to hone them into a more sophisticated, nuanced, and robust understanding of business, our market, leadership, and strategy. My degree was capped off by an incredible trip to Israel, Greece, Jordan, and South Africa, where we worked with impact investment fund managers, and impact entrepreneurs to understand and explore how funding is identified and deployed in ventures specifically designed to make a positive impact on our world. This was truly illuminating and demonstrated that there are so many people and there is so much money being invested right now, and so much time being dedicated, to continuing to make this world better.
ScanCAD has always provided an incredible foundation for my life journey. I have traveled to numerous countries and developed deep friendships with people from all over the world. A given day sees me working with and supporting people in at least three different countries. I love the opportunity to travel and meet our customers and connect with them and learn more about their culture.
I am now the CTO of ScanCAD and have the honor of helping to chart our technological course, overseeing software development and new product creation, while continuing to travel and meet with colleagues and customers.
I am deeply grateful to all of the people who make up this wonderful company – this includes all of our customers, our representatives, distributors, friends, and of course, employees. ScanCAD is what it is because of its community. I have been edified and supported in countless ways over the years by ScanCAD and it is one of the great honors of my life to be part of this beautiful chorus.