Management team

Sam Allen, CEO

Sam brings a wealth of operations and logistics experience to ScanCafe. As COO of a mid-size firm, Sam developed and implemented a global supply chain with fulfillment centers in the US, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. Sam has over 15 years of experience in managing intricate engineering projects for companies like Cisco Systems and Northern Telecom. Sam also has extensive operational experience in both Europe and Asia and managed a $10 billion acquisition portfolio while at Cisco. Prior to joining corporate America, Sam spent ten years living in the mud and dodging bullets as an Officer in the US Marines.

Born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, Sam holds an MBA from the Wharton School of Business and is an avid outdoorsman. Sam began his affair with photography while combat-deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina. There, he kept a Kodak point-and-shoot in the front pocket of his bullet proof vest. And while his camera didn't stop any bullets, it did turn out to be his most useful tool. Be sure to check out Sam’s CEO blog.

Naren Dubey, PhD, Chief Operating Officer,

Naren oversees all of our operations, and is based at our scanning facility in Bangalore, India. He is an accomplished executive in global product development who is at home with precision processes. As the Director of Applied Materials India and its global development centers in China and Russia, Naren led a team of 900 engineers and associates in building wafer-fabrication equipment with extremely high, "six-sigma" quality tolerances. Naren has applied many of those quality programs to our processes at ScanCafe.

Raised in Goa, India, Naren holds an MBA from the Wharton School of Business, and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, where he completed his dissertation in confocal laser scanning microscopy and image processing of biopolymers. He has been awarded patents in the areas of remote plasma generation and the magnetic shielding of plasmas. When he is not patenting things, Naren likes to paint — mostly oil on canvas.

Laurent Martin, Chief Technical Officer,

Laurent is a serial entrepreneur with over 12 years of experience developing software and automation technology. He has built global engineering teams spanning India, the US and Europe, and developed technology partnerships with IBM, HP, and AT&T. Laurent founded CD World to develop the first kiosk-based electronic music distribution infrastructure, authored the first pan-European digital rights management applications, and was a key contributor to IBM's Tiger Shark supercomputer streaming platform. Before founding ScanCafe, he applied his expertise to proteomics at Syrrx, later acquired by Takeda Pharmaceuticals.

Laurent has a Masters in Software Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and holds an MBA from the Wharton School of Business. Father of two, he speaks four languages and would like to live out his days windsurfing or heliboarding. Also, he is the one around the office to settle all arguments about f-stops.

Wade Lagrone, VP Marketing,

Wade has long worked at the leading edge of the consumer internet, with over 10 years of experience in financial services and social networking. Wade led marketing, business development, and product development for the US effort of the world’s first online exchange for person-to-person lending, Zopa. In addition, he has led marketing for Tribe.net, a next-generation social networking site, and an award-winning product management team at Yahoo! Finance, which pioneered a suite of web-based financial management applications for consumers that used account aggregation technology.

Wade graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College and obtained his MBA at the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, where he was the 1996-1998 Brunswick-Urbanek scholar. For fun, Wade plays tennis and his old piano, and uses his D50 to take too many photographs, one of which has wound up in a travel guide.