I joined Playhaven as employee number ten the first product manager. It was at Playhaven that Ryan truly began to hone his product manager chops. Learning the Skills That Would Shape Product Hunt I liked what they were doing, and I really wanted to live in San Francisco, so I began to talk to him about it and ended up flying out to interview with the rest of the team and eventually getting the job. He dropped a hint that he was looking for a product manager, and that planted a seed in my head. I wanted to stay in technology and work in a startup, and San Francisco was a magnet for me.Īndy had left InstantAction shortly after I joined and ended up moving to San Francisco to join Playhaven. Like a lot of others, I was casually looking for companies that I might want to join. Unfortunately, we got to a situation where everyone was jumping ship, and it was pretty clear that it needed a miracle to survive long term.Īnd that’s when a note from a former executive, Andy Yang (now CEO of Upsight), changed Ryan’s course forever. There, Ryan worked for about a year before things began to get choppy… Entering the Workforceĭespite Ryan’s entrepreneurial teenage years, he opted for a more traditional route out of college, when we took a job with InstantAction, a video game startup in Eugene where he interned as a student. It’s a simple statement but sometimes overlooked by product or company builders. You have to create something that has value for people, whether we’re building a product, or a community, or a store for video game enthusiasts to buy, trade and sell their games. What he means by that is that you should find a need that someone has, and fulfill that need. įor example, my dad has always said “find a hole and fill it.” I think a lot of the fundamentals of entrepreneurs are true in both. ![]() My dad always encouraged me to get creative with ideas like this as a pre-teen.Īnd while Ryan’s dad’s businesses have little in common with a platform like Product Hunt, Ryan says he still took away valuable lessons from working in more traditional ventures: I’d go to -at the time, it was the best resource to get walkthroughs-and I would print them out and put them in these little handmade books and then sell walkthroughs to the new Zelda game, or to Goldeneye or whatever. I also started selling these game walkthrough handbooks. It wasn’t long before Ryan found other entrepreneurial inspirations… That was cool as a kid, because I learned “oh, I can do this thing that can turn into actual money.” That’s how capitalism works in some ways and it doesn’t have to be through a traditional job where you get paid hourly. I’d collect the money and then I used my grandpa’s old Apple computer to record revenues and expenses in a spreadsheet. It was heavy, and maybe it was only $5 or so, but it felt like a lot of money. As a kid, holding a giant bag of quarters was meaningful. I’d collect all of the coins and quarters. I’d fill them up and make sure they were stocked. When I was 11 or 12, it was my responsibility to manage the gumball machines, which didn’t mean I would do a whole lot of work, but as a very young kid I had to buy more gumballs, Runts, Reese’s M&M’s, that sort of thing. In his early teens, Ryan was already allowed to do some managerial work. That was just one of the many different businesses that he ran over the years, and I think a lot of my entrepreneurial passions come from him giving me opportunities to do entrepreneurial things at an early age. Games just weren’t that easy to get, and so eventually he opened a video game store in Eugene, Oregon. This was back when video games were not in WalMarts everywhere, and of course you couldn’t just download them online yet. When he was an adult in the late 80’s or 90’s, he used to sell video games out of the back of his car. His dad has been hustling since Ryan was born… ![]() Ryan isn’t the first entrepreneur in his family.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |