To build in matter home for mind.*
I’ve spent the last twenty years at the intersection of product, technology, and people, building software, leading teams, and helping companies turn ideas into real products.
Born in Pennsylvania and raised in New Jersey, my story starts where many millennial software developers’ stories do: glued to a screen at age twelve, building a Pokémon fan site on AngelFire held together with basic HTML and iframes. My obsession with the American import of Japanese culture led me to study the language as a (serious) hobby and earned me a scholarship to leave home at 14 and spend a year in Fukui Prefecture as a high school exchange student.
From there I went to university in London, then moved to Seoul, South Korea to found an online arts magazine, curate exhibitions and lead an artist collective. Perpetually broke, I learned what it means to build something from nothing with no budget and no permission long before anyone was paying me to do it.
I translated the skills I learned leading teams and promoting exhibitions into a series of marketing roles at a few boutique agencies before realising I was generating a substantial portion of their revenue and decided to strike out on my own.
A chance encounter with Ben Dixon, now CTO of Sona.ai, and Huw Walters, later Staff AI Product Manager at Meta, at the UK’s first Startup Weekend introduced us to Eric Ries and the Lean Startup methodology. That weekend led to us founding our first company, a data aggregation and digital analytics startup that later earned an invitation to 10 Downing Street in recognition of excellence in entrepreneurship.
While working out of Google Campus London, I was offered a role at BioBeats, a digital health company (spun out of heart-rate variability research at the University of Surrey) where I served as CMO for three years. We serviced global insurance companies and health brands, grew it into a leading AI platform in the human health space, and it was later acquired by Huma.com.
During my time at BioBeats I trained as a certified yoga teacher under the direct mentorship of yoga master Rahoul Masrani. I also lectured in entrepreneurship at Surrey Business School and digital analytics at the University of Exeter, teaching hundreds of founders at undergraduate and masters level.
Today I live by the beach with my Boston Terrier and wife of 21 years, where I run Applaud Software, my personal software studio building tools for consultants, indie founders, and people going independent. I’ve built and sold five bootstrapped SaaS businesses along the way, each small by design and profitable enough to matter, which taught me everything I know about moving fast in B2C software.
I continue to do data science at the University of Surrey as an externally funded researcher and serve as fractional CPO for a small number of companies at a time. I also organise Silicon Mingle, a tech community that has brought together over a thousand builders across the North of England since 2023.
As fCPO, I sit with your board, translate grand visions into technical roadmap, design UI/UX around your actual customers, and work with developer teams to make sure your product gets built. If you need someone who can move between the strategic and the tactical without losing either, that’s the work I do.
Contact: travis@travisstreet.com
Selected Clients
