In this episode of the SmartMoney Ventures Podcast, Ry Walker tells the story of his entrepreneurial journey from college dropout to Unicorn success in Cincinnati, Ohio.

In this episode, you will learn:

1. How to build Unicorn software companies in Cincinnati Ohio.
2. Why the entrepreneur’s journey is like mountain climbing, where you value the climb more than the peak itself.
3. How Astronomer & Tembo are commercializing open source platforms and challenging software giants like Oracle and Snowflake.
4. What NBA Legend LeBron James and startup CEOs have in common.
5. Why we learn more from failure than we do from success.
6. Advice for tech entrepreneurs: Visit San Francisco, build confidence, pursue speed.

Ry Walker is one of those rare entrepreneurs who sees trends before most other people do. After dropping out of college at 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, trying to sell them websites, 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 years old, 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. He describes Astronomer as a pipeline for data, built on top of Apache Airflow, a Python based open-source workflow management platform. Ry served as CEO for 4 years, CTO for 2 more years, and left to start another company and become an investor.

In November of 2022, he founded Tembo, a developer platform built on top of PostGres, an open-source relational database management system. Coming strong out of the gate, he raised a $7 Million dollar seed round led by Venrock with CincyTech, Cintrifuse Capital, Fireroad, Grand Ventures and Wireframe Ventures participating. Ry believes that commercial platforms built on top of open-source software is the future, and is a founding principle for both Astronomer and Tembo.

Ry has been recognized as a Cincinnati “Top 40 Under 40” and is an AngelPad alum. He loves nature, science, art, sports, and indie game development.

I know that you’ll enjoy hearing Ry share his story of entrepreneurship and all the wisdom that he’s learned along the way. Enjoy!