Ex-Investment Banker Pursues a Business Idea from His College Days By digitizing old photos and videos, ScanDigital turns picture preservation into a profitable business.

Things were good for Anderson Schoenrock when he took a lucrative position with Lehman Brothers after graduating from Dartmouth in 2001. They got better when he partnered with colleagues in 2004 to start a boutique investment firm for commercial real estate; better still when the market boomed from 2004 through 2006; and better once again when Jones Lang LaSalle acquired the company in 2006, leaving Schoenrock with a lucrative package and continuing opportunities for profit.

But Schoenrock, now 32 and CEO of photo scanning company ScanDigital, walked away from all of it in 2007, banking his future on an entrepreneurial idea he'd had since college: to create an easy and versatile method of scanning and converting photos and videos into digital assets that would never deteriorate.

The idea stemmed from a conversation with his college friend--and now co-founder of ScanDigital--Michael Mothner, who was describing his mother's reaction to getting a digital camera. "This is great," she told Mothner, "but how do I take all those photo albums in the garage from the last 20 years and put them on the computer so I have all of my digital photos and old photos together?"