PROFESSIONAL BIO
Jan’s leadership experience both in startups and large corporations has given her a unique perspective and collection of best practices, resulting in four successful acquisitions and one IPO.
With formative years spent early at IBM and Lotus Development (the largest software publishing com in the US at the time), Jan developed an understanding of corporate systems at scale, enterprise software, and what disruption thinking could mean to drive new markets.
After being recruited in her late twenties to join a C-suite team in a venture-backed startup, Jan was hooked! For the next 17 years, she served as VP of Sales and Chief Revenue Officer for multiple ventures, building industry-recognized teams that were consistently awarded for performance. These companies were notable industry wins such as ViewStar, FileNet, and Watermark, all with successful acquisitions. Jan moved to Austin in 1996 to be founding VP of Sales for Vignette Corporate in the early days of the internet. Vignette had the most successful IPO in the Southwest in 1999 (at one point carrying a valuation of over $9b) before the “dot-com bubble” burst. (Valuable lessons learned!) It was at this time that Jan honed the repeatable methodologies she uses today for success in her own startups and shares them with and students and high-growth teams.
After spending time in both Silicon Valley and Dallas, Jan settled with her family in her beloved Austin, Texas, to become a 3-time entrepreneur. She was drawn to the early “firsts” happening in digital predictive analytics, a field that was just emerging. She had two exits, one with on-premise enterprise software, (acquired by Oracle in 2006) and a second SaaS-based enterprise software company for social customer care (exited to Lithium Technologies in 2012.)
Jan experienced a dawning first-hand realization of how different it is for a woman to be an entrepreneur in our society today. After the acquisition of her company Social Dynamx in 2012 by Lithium Technologies, she knew she was being drawn to give back and help advance this next generation of female founders. For more, read here.
“ I often work with companies who believe they have a strong corporate strategy, but because they’ve never developed a true revenue growth strategy, particularly one built around customer value and experience, their field execution falls short. In order to get clarity at the top, we have to understand the interlocking of the entire commercial supply chain, and how customer value cascades through product, pricing, marketing, sales, customer success. ”
WOMEN@AUSTIN
VENTURE DINNERS
Of the many “firsts” introduced into the Austin ecosystem with Women@Austin, one of the most impactful was a salon-styled dinner series called “Venture Dinners,” facilitated by Jan Ryan and underwritten by JP Morgan. Each dinner connected five female entrepreneurs with five active investors from the Austin ecosystem, for an evening of authentic conversations. Always a popular evening, the dinner was specifically designed not to be a pitch event per se (though female founders are always pitching!). These dinners directly addressed one of the biggest issues for female founders today – lack of a meaningful network around funding.
