Knolbe
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Ryan Stout
Ryan is an experienced tech entrepreneur with expertise in AI, software engineering, and business growth. He started coding at 13. After college he co-founded AgileGames. Within a year, the social gaming company amassed over 10 million users, peaking at 500,000 daily active users. His success led to a recruitment by Apple to help develop their mobile ad platform.
In 2010, Ryan turned his attention to AI and machine learning. He obtained funding in 2012 for a start-up that built a custom AI model, using the precursor to today's large language models, to predict personality traits from Facebook data.
In 2017, he launched Arsenal, a hardware device that brought iPhone-like AI photo technology to 100s of DSLR/mirrorless cameras. Despite having no prior hardware experience, Ryan was quickly able to learn the necessary skills to lead in house hardware design and set up production lines in China. Arsenal quickly expanded to 35 employees and has distributed over 250,000 units worldwide.
Ryan is currently looking to leverage his deep AI expertise to build a company which helps businesses capitalize on the recent advances in AI.
Mike Bianco
Mike Bianco started programming in middle school, doing freelance work and building small software businesses. He cut his teeth as the first tech employee at a publishing company, growing the team to over 10 employees. He then consulted for various Silicon Valley startups while launching various businesses on the side.
One of the businesses grew into a technology company (SuiteSync) to automate accounting processes for enterprise companies. In a little over two years, he hired a small team, sold the software to companies such as IndieGoGo, Asana, and Glassdoor, and was one of the first acquisitions by the largest privately held company in the country—Stripe.
He spent a couple years managing engineering teams, setting product direction, and building new software in various teams across Stripe. He couldn’t resist starting another company after seeing the new opportunities brought about by advances in AI, and left Stripe to build something new.