I'm not good at baseball.
I’m Chris Davey, employee #1.
EARLY ON
Growing up in southern California was amazing. Being a kid is awesome though. I played sports everyday in the street, or at the school until the streetlights came on. Soccer was my game, basketball was a close second.
Later in life my dad, mom, sister and dog Ginger moved to Granite Bay, California. I cried. I hated leaving my friends. It was the right thing to do though.
SCHOOL
After graduating Oakmont High School (Go Vikings!) I went to the 13th grade at Sierra Junior College. I was adrift that year. I liked drafting, and math came easily to me. So I decided “I’ll be an architect” just like Mr. Brady.
ARCHITECTURE SCHOOL!
Graduating with my super impressive AA from Sierra college, I set my sites on architecture school. Unfortunately, I needed a GPA of 4.3 to get into any California school. I got accepted to some private art schools, but that wasn’t in the card$ financially.
HOW ABOUT INDUSTRIAL DESIGN?
I applied to several out-of-states schools, and got accepted to a few. After touring Arizona State University in Tempe, I was hooked. While touring I saw these amazing sketches of concept cars, fast-looking toasters, and swoopy designs.
Industrial Design had everything I liked:
- Cars
- Drawing
- CAD
- Graphic Design
- Engineering
- 3 less years of school!
CAREER TIME!
After graduating, I went to work for the company that I interned with the prior summer — DESIGNOLOGY.
Work was amazing! So many different projects, speakers for JBL, telephones for Motorola, heaters for Holmes. I expanded the firms offerings in graphic design as well.
I was working 60-80 hours a week, and after two years I was exhausted and missed home.
PLAY TIME!
Not what you think. I landed a great job at an fun company called Play.
Play specialized in video hardware and software, disrupting big network video editors. I initially worked in the marketing department designing packaging, magazine ads, and user interfaces.
I moved to the engineering department after two years. This was a huge culture change. Marketing literally looked like the inside of a spaceship, engineering was cubicles and fluorescent lights. BUT, I loved getting to design products again.
Play had a lot of great years, but struggled through 9/11 as many companies did.
PHOTOSHOOT
Visan was started with a handful of Play employees. Finally able to invent again, we thrived. We created a powerful photo-gifting platform similar to the unknown SnapFish. We landed a contract with Hewlett Packard in which we collected very small royalties based on square inches printed, along with R&D services.
I was lead designer for UX and UI, as well as all the marketing materials and packaging. Eventually my role turned to managing designers and software release schedules.
We won several awards, including one of the longest contracts HP has ever signed.
Then iPhones happened. No one was printing anymore.
TIME TO PIVOT
Several of us were really excited about LEDs. Visan became RocketLife and launched a light designer for LEDs.
We debuted at MakerFaire in 2018, and initial response was overwhelming. We continued to develop the platform, I again was responsible for the user interface, marketing, and prototypes to showcase the possibilities of our software and hardware.
We have customers from all walks of life using Light Designer, including the guys from Mythbusters (Norman Chan), furniture designers (Nova), movie prop makers (Ghostbuster 2020 2021), even a Mermaid (AdaFruit).
BEKONIX
As RocketLife was gaining popularity, so was Covid19. We downsized to four, and brought on an investment funding specialist. We continue to make great strides, but funding is proving to be difficult in this unknown lock-downed society.
As we grow, I continue to work side gigs to keep the axe sharp. Honestly, it’s given me time to learn more, deep-dive, and develop business relationships.
LINKS TO CURRENT CLIENTS
