Rodrigo Sanchez

To be honest, my career to this point has been far from traditional. After graduating from MIT in 2008, I spent 9 years working as an active duty Air Force aerospace engineer and project manager. I had the privilege of managing multi-million-dollar rocket launch missions, running early test and evaluation campaigns for top-secret satellite programs, and working as an executive officer (or chief of staff in the private sector) for a base commander. But after those 9 years, while the work was thrilling at times, I felt ready to make an impact in a different way. I spent the last year of my active duty career as a management instructor at the Air Force Academy, where I taught undergraduate entrepreneurship, venture management, and marketing courses. Teaching those classes sparked an entrepreneurial fire in me, and I ended up separating from the active duty Air Force after my first year at the Academy in order to pursue business opportunities with my family.

That opportunity happened to be in the family travel sector. You see, my wife and I love to explore and seek adventure, and throughout my year at the AF Academy we had been building a digital marketing and content creation business on the side. Early success on that business led us to quit our jobs, sell most of our stuff, rent out our house in Colorado Springs, and embark on a full-time family travel adventure with our two young children. Between June of 2018 and March of 2020, we visited more than 100 cities in over 40 countries, and worked with more than 50 brands in the travel industry (like Royal Caribbean, Grand Hyatt, state and city tourism boards, and tour operators) on content creation and social media campaigns. Those two years were the best of our lives so far; we spent all day together as a family and worked our butts off on projects we were excited and passionate about. Unfortunately, as the COVID-19 pandemic started to unfold, we had to cut our travels short and return to the U.S. Many of our contracts for the year, unsurprisingly, were cancelled due to the sharp decline in global travel. This has freed up our time to pursue other projects in the mean-time!