Travis
French.

Entrepreneurship was already close to home. I watched my truck-driver father turn the Shotmaker Groove Cleaner from an idea into a business that supported our family and others. Seeing a person nurture an idea into something real changes what you believe is possible.

Then I found HTML. There was no YouTube tutorial waiting for me—just AOL dial-up, source code, and curiosity. I reverse-engineered websites, wrote my first pages by hand, and became convinced the web would be part of my future.

I started in commercial banking, where three Wall Street veterans brought me a problem and were told the answer would take two weeks. I delivered it by hand in 24 hours. Nearly a year later, I became the first hire at their future global investment bank.

As a licensed Series 7, 63, and 55 generalist, I built and ran Nevada’s only sell-side equities trading desk. The firm expanded to Las Vegas, New York, Hong Kong, and Macau, advised on billions in investment-banking transactions, and executed billions in stock for major hedge funds and mutual funds.

I thrived there—until decisions outside my control changed the economics of the desk. When the firm eventually shuttered it, I had to choose what came next.

I chose to build, and I chose real estate. I entered as a Realtor to understand the industry from inside the work: learn the customer, find what was missing, and look for where the market was going.

After selling an unmistakable number of Opendoor homes, I saw a new category forming. When iBuyers began paying referral commissions across state lines without a listing agreement, the first product idea arrived: FirstandSold.com—one site, multiple iBuyer cash offers.

Months after launch, COVID stopped iBuyers in their tracks. When the market returned, referral programs disappeared, so First&Sold evolved into a licensed brokerage and launched Nevada’s first Buy Before You Sell program.

Bootstrapping against venture-backed competitors made paid advertising a losing equation—especially with fair-housing rules limiting targeting. Organic search became the only credible path.

I learned programmatic SEO and built a 5,000-plus-page guide to every community, subdivision, and school in the Las Vegas Valley. It worked, and eventually grew to more than 230,000 pages covering the country.

At its peak, the brand appeared in more than 30 million searches a month and reached nearly 100,000 monthly visitors. The market later slowed, capital vanished after a competitor’s nine-figure collapse, and the model became too risky—but the lesson stayed: when you cannot outspend, you can still outbuild.

I went back to the instinct that started all of this: make useful things and ship them. There was plenty of trial and error, several closed sites, and a clearer understanding of what deserved another iteration.

That work became a growing portfolio: AgentNook, Graze.day, Get Out Garage, and Jjin Learn Korean—different ideas and audiences, all built with the same ownership and care.

Today I build internal systems, apps, and websites for others while growing my own portfolio and looking for opportunities with real complexity.

I am a generalist by design: strategy, product, software, growth, and the operational details that turn an idea into something people can actually use. If the problem is difficult and the outcome matters, I am interested.