bike commuter, fly fishing spiritualist, backyard pizza master, father of teens
Ryan leads Jove’s Product and Marketing teams, guiding strategy for our software products and how we communicate about them. His 25-year career in marketing and communications started unpromisingly in, of all things, poetry writing. As a twenty-something holder of two Masters’ degrees whose only work experience was guiding whitewater rafting trips and, literally, washing dishes, and having been turned down for a gig delivering pizza in Seattle, he lucked into a writing job at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where he worked in the Libraries program helping address the Digital Divide in low-income communities across the US and Canada. After 5 years in philanthropy he spent a decade in digital agencies within WPP and Publicis before joining Starbucks, where he built from scratch a world class social media operation before taking on broader scope as vice president of digital marketing. Most recently, Ryan worked at Amazon, where he led a team of creatives, media planners, and data scientists running experimentation programs in digital media. Plan B was always to be a bike messenger, and that’s not off the table as a future retirement gig: “Just gotta get some tattoos.”