Ry Walker is one of those rare entrepreneurs who sees trends before most other people do. After dropping out of the University of Cincinnati, he got hired to build and deliver IBM clone computers and teach people how to use early PC software tools.
Then he founded his first company, SharkBytes, building websites in 1995 in downtown Cincinnati. He and his brother went to businesses, unplugged their fax machines, and showed people the internet — many times being told to plug the fax machine back in. Failure is part of the process, but getting back up is essential.
They built SharkBytes to 30 employees and sold it to a rollup in 1999. He was a paper millionaire at 27, only to watch it go up in flames in the "dot-bomb" of 2000/2001.
Fast forward to 2015, when he founded Astronomer — a software company that has raised over $280M of venture capital and is valued at over $1 Billion, built on top of Apache Airflow. In 2022 he founded Tembo, a developer platform built on PostGres, opening with a $7M seed round led by Venrock.
- How to build Unicorn software companies in Cincinnati, Ohio.
- Why the entrepreneur's journey is like mountain climbing.
- How Astronomer and Tembo commercialize open-source platforms.
- The realities of raising venture capital in the Heartland.