Matt Swan - Managing Director
Matt grew up convinced he was going to be a vet, but on finding he had more talent for physics than biology and an enjoyment for geography, he transitioned his love of nature into a love of geoscience. Geophysics therefore seemed a good fit and he could spend his career doing things with earthquakes, volcanos and cool stuff like that…. or alternatively, fall into the Oil & Gas industry.
That first landing place was Veritas who were hiring endless graduates and putting them into company housing – essentially a 3 year extension of university, but being paid to be there. However once that novelty wore off it was time to think about what he really wanted to do with his career, and the first of many jumps were made into sales & marketing, then on into the multi-client division. Yes, despite dreaming of scientific jobs since he was young, he was now in business (hold onto those dreams kids!), deciding to go back and study for an MBA in his spare time.
By 2011, CGG had taken full hold of Veritas and it was time to move on to TGS where he became the ultimate utility player. At one point for the Europe team he was overseeing data management, contracts, marketing, project coordination and market analysis, built a global market intelligence portal, participated in multiple M&A projects, and project managed the integration of Spectrum & TGS that culminated in 'integrating myself out of the company'… which was a great ice breaker when we first introduced RockWave, but a joke we’ve now heard too many times!
If you believe that everything happens for a reason, then that varied career has certainly set RockWave up well. With someone that has seen most aspects of how a seismic company works he is the one that picks up the things the rest of us hate (finance and contracts anyone?). Given he wrote a 100 page business plan for us and accurately forecast our first 2 years of revenues then you’ll understand how our technical team are freed from thinking about anything else other than optimising your data.
