Our Team

J. Scott Zimmerman - CEO, Co-Founder

Scott was instrumental in forming the concept and strategy of StepUp Travel. After graduating from Columbia University with a B.A. in Economics, he had a mind for poverty alleviation. For several years he worked as senior financial analyst for The Related Companies in New York City, completing $230 Million investment in community developers building low-income housing developments under state and federal tax incentive policies. His professional exposure gave him insight in how investment in small businesses and developers is vital to the growth and health of the community where they reside. With this mindset, he helped found StepUp Travel with the vision of creating an open marketplace technology for the adventure travel industry, granting access to marketing tools for all service providers and helping redistribute wealth in a world that suffers from broadening inequalities. In this spirit, StepUp Travel aligns with the United Nations ST-EP initiative (Sustainable Tourism-Eliminating Poverty).

Scott was born and raised in Missoula, Montana and later moved to New York City where he lived for eight years. His love of culture and people has brought him to Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, India, and England. He has spent nearly three years traveling South America, Central America, and much of Asia. He speaks Spanish and Portuguese fluently and considers Rio de Janeiro home away from home. He is currently finishing his training in neurology at Stanford University.

Anush Ramani - CTO, Co-founder

Mr. Ramani leads StepUp Travel’s technology strategy and development. Prior to joining StepUp he worked on large scale identity management systems and ultra-high volume web products at Fidelity Investments in Boston, MA. Mr. Ramani is responsible for architecting and building the StepUp platform to be scalable and ultra-extensible with the latest Web 2.0 technologies. Since the early age of 10, when he was first introduced to a computer (and programmed his first game), Mr Ramani has been strongly involved in the computer technologies and software development methodologies. Mr. Ramani regularly donates his time and technical expertise to non-profit organizations, such as Oiste (Boston, U.S.A.), and also contributes to open-source projects like Symfony and Piwik. Currently based in Palo Alto, California, Mr. Ramani has also lived in India and the Middle East.

Mr. Ramani earned a Bachelor of Science with honors from the University of Massachusetts in Computer Science

Trip Sweeney, Co-founder

Trip has six years involvement in sustainable tourism research and advocacy. He has an extended network of tourism colleagues working in academia, industry, and government. In addition to StepUp Travel, he has been a leading voice in microfinance tourism as highlighted in an article featured by Brave New Traveler entitled, Why we need microloan tours instead of slum tourism. This article seeded the formation of Investours.org, for which Trip is an executive board member. Trip has been an invited speaker on sustainable tourism foriegn investment at University of Pennsylania for the Penn International Business Volunteers' Conferece on Corporate Social Responsibility. He was also an invited speaker at the International Institute of Peace through Tourism 2006 Conference in Kampala, Uganda, where he discussed the role of internet technology in marketing for small tourism enterprises. Beyond his constributions to the concept of of StepUp Travel, Trip has been instrumental in using his team management skills to develop a unique pipeline for content acquisition. Trip has lived in Chile and Brazil and has traveled to Mozambique, South Africa, Uganda, France, and England. He is fluent in Portuguese and proficient in Spanish. He graduated magna cum laude from Vanderbilt University and graduated with high honors from University of Kentucky College of Medicine in May 2009. He is currently at Stanford University training in Pathology.

Sylvia Lee, Director of Marketing

Ms. Lee comes to StepUp Travel after seven years as senior business leader at Travelocity where she led online e-commerce marketing and was responsible for emerging areas including packaging, activities, and niche marketing. Under her marketing and business development leadership, Travelocity grew into a $1B business throughout her tenure there. Ms. Lee also worked as the executive marketing lead for jaman.com, an international social networking movie destination. At jaman.com, her team focused on traffic growth, paid search, SEO, widgets/games, partners, sponsorships, merchandising, CRM, design, customer service, reporting, editorial and transcoding. The team increased website traffic to one of the top ten trafficked sites in its category within six months and exponentially grew the site’s user base to over one million worldwide through online marketing, key partnerships, and SEO/SEM. Ms. Lee earned her Master of Business Administration from the American Graduate School of International Management in Arizona, and her Bachelor of Science in Advertising from the University of Illinois.

Amy Robinson, Marketing Consultant

Ms. Robinson has over 15 years of marketing and business development experience in consumer packaged goods, technology and online marketplaces. Her expertise includes brand management, e-commerce, public relations, advertising, consumer research and insight, strategic partnerships, and online marketing. She launched her career in advertising and marketing at Grey Advertising in New York and Nestle Food Company in Los Angeles, where she focused on two product launches: Carnation Kids snacks and Libby’s Asian Favorites dinner kits. From Nestle, she moved back to the Bay Area/Silicon Valley to pursue her marketing career and passion for building businesses and creating great brands at innovative companies: The Learning Company, Purple Moon, Pets.com, Ingenio (acquired by AT&T in December 2007), Elance.com, and most recently a clean tech start-up, Ultra Motor. Ms. Robinson earned her Masters of Business Administration from the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University and graduated from Brown University with a Bachelor of Arts in Economics and Applied Mathematics.

Partners

Xola Consulting

Xola Consulting is an international tourism development consulting and research services firm with a specific focus on adventure and nature tourism. It supports governments, tour operators, and non-profit organizations seeking to use adventure and nature tourism as a means of rural economic development.

In partnership with StepUp Network, Xola is linking its destination clients with the best technology to drive online consumer and industry marketing efforts.

The Xola team is comprised of consultants who, in addition to having consulting industry expertise, are unique in that many of them have owned, operated or provided guiding services for adventure and nature travel companies. They understand adventure and nature tourism market development from the tour operator perspective while also having the technical expertise to guide new market entrants in creating products that will be sustainable, benefiting communities and the environment into the future. It is this mix of experiences that make Xola uniquely suited to support StepUp Network implementations in destinations.

Clients include the governments of India, Mexico, Mongolia, Montenegro and Peru as well as numerous businesses and non profit organizations throughout North America, Latin America and Asia.

StepUp Travel and Xola Consulting have been working together since 2009, when we first learned fo one another and our shared vision of what the adventure travel industry can be. Together we believe adventure travel industry can be harnessed to Support, Elevate, and Advocate.