In our Meet Addepar series, we sit down with the people at the heart of our success — those who enable us to consistently deliver excellent outcomes for our clients. Today, we speak to Travis Larsen, Director of the Technical Solutions Architect team at Addepar. 

Travis leverages deep industry experience gained from years with Goldman Sachs and his time here at Addepar. In his role, he builds custom integrations and helps clients bring automation to their workflows through Addepar’s APIs — accelerating development by connecting technical expertise with a deep understanding of Addepar’s application and finance domain knowledge.

He’s in it for the love of problem-solving; embracing every new project like a puzzle, he strategically employs his technical toolkit and expert team to reach the most efficient solution and position clients for operational success, saving them time and bolstering their capabilities.

Can you tell us about how you got to where you are today?

Growing up, I loved to build things. I had kits like ‘build-a-robot’ or ‘build-an-LED’ and would build RC airplanes. I remember at age 16 during the early days of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) going to client consultations with my dad, who was an entrepreneur and engineer, to help him install phone systems. From a young age, I was always solving puzzles, looking for solutions and learning to be technical.

I went on to study economics at a liberal arts school in Salt Lake City and started at Goldman Sachs out of college. I spent nearly nine years at Goldman — the first half in the Private Wealth Management division, the second half as Vice President of Alternative Investments and Manager Selection.

I joined Addepar in 2018 and have held a few different roles since, including leading a team of solution consultants in our core business, leading our Navigator implementation team (our cash flow projection tool built for the alternatives space), and for the last two years or so, leading our technical solutions architect team to build integrations, help our clients automate their workflows and build scripted-solutions for the broader organization.

How have your experiences at Goldman Sachs informed your understanding of Addepar clients and the way you work with them?

I think they’ve been informative in a lot of ways. For one thing, I’ve worked with similar clients in similar roles at Goldman, including wealthy individuals, institutions, pension funds, etc. I know the demands that our clients are facing and the need for clean data, robust reporting and automation to make their jobs easier. Experience has taught me how manual a lot of analysis work can be, so it’s exciting to get to work with clients, building solutions that improve efficiency, speed and accuracy. 

What difference does automation make for our clients today?

It makes a massive difference. I think there’s a big misconception that you need a large development team and big tech budget to introduce automation to your workflows. In reality, that’s not true. We have clients from SFOs up to institutional investors leveraging our APIs — some are doing it with just one IT professional, some with just an inquisitive non-IT person finding ways to automate operations.

Of course, our larger clients have bigger teams, but I don’t think it’s an all-or-nothing exercise. You can dip your toes in and slowly make progress if you’re not ready to tackle a large project.

What’s your advice to firms out there looking to build their own tech integration?

I’d always advise firms to make sure they have the right people involved in the project — both technical people who will build the integration and people from the business side to craft the right requirements. Firms should also have realistic expectations around what they’re looking to build. If you have a lot of projects in scope, think through priorities and the natural flow of the project to help determine what should be built first, second, and so on.

For smaller firms, this doesn’t have to be a herculean effort. You can start adding automation slowly and build on it over time. Our team is here to help you get started and bridge any pain points you have along the way.

Do you have any tips and tricks for developers looking to leverage Addepar?

Yes! For developers, I’d encourage you to reach out to your client management team and ask for a copy of our API collection. There, you can access sample code for every example of available APIs. You can drag and drop these samples into your code editor to get started on making API calls. This, along with our Developer Portal, is a great way to jumpstart leveraging our APIs.

I sometimes take it for granted because I’ve been using the Addepar software for 6+ years now, but it’s still cool to see clients benefit from it. It’s a nice reminder that what the engineering and product teams have built here really is special.

What new developments are you most excited about for 2025? And beyond that?

I’m really excited about the direction that API development is taking here at Addepar. We’ve decentralized it over the past year or so, so it now falls to each respective product team. As a result, we’ve seen a proliferation of API functionality across the platform.

I’m also excited about a few other offerings that Addepar is working on (that I can’t disclose quite yet) that will help clients integrate more deeply with the platform and surface data in a faster, more efficient way.