Rob Ryan (entrepreneur)
| Robert J. Ryan | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born | 1948 |
| Nationality |
 United States
|
| Occupation | Former Chief Executive Officer |
| Known for | Founder and CEO of Ascend Communications |
Rob Ryan (born 1948) is the founder, past chairman and CEO of Ascend Communications, and currently mentors entrepreneurs through his Entrepreneur America Mentors' bootcamps at his ranch in Montana. Ryan earned national attention when he grew his 1989 start-up company, Ascend Communications, to more than $2 billion in sales. Lucent Technologies acquired Ascend in 1999 for approximately $20 billion in what was termed at the time the "largest technology merger ever."
Effectively, Ascend helped create the modern Internet by building all of the infrastructure equipment that powered the Internet worldwide. At the end of 1995, Rob won the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year award for Northern California (including Silicon Valley). Rob also was selected as the Cornell University Entrepreneur of the Year for 2002. Following Ascend’s success, Rob has helped build several start-up and early-stage ventures into multi-billion dollar companies, including Right Now Technologies and Silicon Spice, among others. His entrepreneurial successes have transformed businesses using his Sunflower ModelTM.
Ryan received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1969 from Cornell University and began his career as a systems analyst with Burroughs, then worked at Lawrence Livermore Lab on the first non-military extension of Arpanet, the precursor to the Internet. In the late 1970s he was the principal architect of DECnet and the Intel portion of the Ethernet specification while working at Digital Equipment Corp. in the Boston area. He founded Softcom, Inc. in the early 1980s, sold it in two years to Hayes Microcomputer Products, Inc. and worked there as Director of Research and Development until the late 1980s.
In 1989, Rob left Hayes with three engineers to found Ascend. Rob served as President, CEO, and Chairman of Ascend, taking it public Friday 13, May 1994, at $13.00 per share. Under Rob’s leadership, Ascend became the leading manufacturer of Point of Presence boxes (POPS) for Internet providers. Ascend grew from zero sales in 1989 to over 500 million sales in 1996. In 1995, the last year Rob served as CEO of Ascend, the stock was acknowledged as the best performer of the year on all of Wall Street.
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