Overview

Gender

male

Investor Type

Investment Partner,Angel

Investor Stage

Early stage Venture,Seed,Venture

Ryan is known as a founding investor who takes on the riskiest sectors and business models. Undaunted by regulatory risk around antiquated gambling laws and convinced of a new generation of sports fans indoctrinated into the world of reality TV and experiential media, he was the first institutional investor in the United States to bet on and validate Daily Fantasy Sports and online gambling. In 2011 a small team of performance marketers at Vistaprint founded DraftKings; Ryan seeded the company with $500k and for the first two years of the company’s existence was its sole institutional investor. In 2013 Ryan brokered DraftKings’ landmark partnership with Major League Baseball, paving the way for the company to establish partnerships with every major professional league and a majority of professional teams in the US. He has structured every round of capital on DraftKings’ cap table since its founding, facilitating over $900M in fundraising despite significant regulatory headwinds. Today, DraftKings is operating the first legal online sportsbook in the US and has 11M, active users, on its platform that generate over $3B in entry fees and handle.

In 2012 Ryan was the founding investor in Plastiq, an online payments platform founded by Harvard undergrads. Payments is a legacy industry reluctant to change and fraught with regulatory barriers, but Ryan was undaunted by the risk of both the sector and first-time founders. Since founding, Ryan sourced and facilitated each of the company’s fundraising rounds, most recently bringing in Kleiner Perkins and DST for a $27M financing. Plastiq processes over $1B in transactions annually.

In 2013 Ryan was the founding investor in Crew, a design and development services marketplace. In 2017 he and the founders crafted and spun out Unsplash, the world’s largest photo-sharing community built on the theme of decentralization of photos and visual content. Unsplash has outpaced both Shutterstock and Getty combined. In 2018, Ryan facilitated Unsplash’s $12M Series A with Bedrock Capital.

Ryan is a well-networked fundraiser. Most recently he sourced and structured financings at Currencycloud (Sapphire Ventures, Series C/D, $43M; Google Ventures, Series E) and Skillz (Telstra and Liberty Media, Series C, $17M; NFL and Wildcat, Series D, $35M). Before joining Atlas, he sourced and facilitated the sale of Enpocket to Nokia, WHERE to Paypal, and Vela Systems to Autodesk.

Ryan also sits on the board of MOO, Globoforce, and Secret Escapes, all of which generate over $100M in revenue annually. He graduated with an AB in economics from Princeton, where he captained the football team and served in the ROTC.