Ryan Holmes
Ryan Holmes
Ryan Holmesis a Canadian computer programmer and internet entrepreneur. He is best known as the founder and CEO of Hootsuite, a social media management tool for businesses. Holmes began developing Hootsuite in 2008 through his agency Invoke Media...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionBusinessman
Date of Birth30 December 1974
CountryCanada
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Every day I'd come home after school, pop the hood of my mom's car, put alligator clips on the battery, and wire into the house and go play on my computer. If I used it for too long, I'd wear down the car battery, and my mom would be all mad at me the next day.
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Pizza made me who I am. In the summer of 1998, I dropped out of college and started a pizza restaurant called Growlies in my hometown in rural Canada. My seed money: a credit card with a $20,000 limit.
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During the early days of HootSuite, when social media was still seen as a fad, I made the decision to treat our funding as if it were my personal bank account. That's not to say I blew it on fast cars and fancy dinners. Exactly the opposite.
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As a child, I did what any normal kid who grew up without any electricity would do - I spent countless hours working on a computer wired to my parents' car battery... and learned how to code. This natural passion for computers lead me into the Internet market during the late 1990s and early 2000s.
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Without grounding, it's easy to embrace the 'baller' lifestyle: dropping out of tech, throwing money at cars, boats and real estate, and slipping into a cycle of spending and indulgence.
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When my company was first getting off the ground, we were completely lost in the shuffle, despite our best efforts. In 2012, however, we had a 28-foot-long, 15,000-pound secret weapon. To stand out amid the gala parties and blow-out bashes hosted by much bigger tech companies, HootSuite decided to take to the streets.
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Everybody getting a significant exit creates a legacy and creates something that you can pay forward and bootstrap an industry in a substantial way.
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At the most basic level, prioritizing design also represents a practical consideration. It's far easier to design first and engineer later.
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Facebook, Twitter and Google have all opened offices in Brazil, recognizing the importance of localizing their products and customer service efforts.
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I'd like to think my company HootSuite is anything but a stodgy old-boys' club. As a social media company, our employees are by and large young, progressive and open-minded.
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My first real venture was a paintball company I started in Grade 10, when I was 16. After hearing about it from a friend, I realized my town didn't have a playing field. I did some research, spoke with other paintball company owners, and I started my own field the following summer.
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One of the most important principles I've learned is, every so often, just drop everything. Stop racing from one party to the next.
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One of the ironies of a conference dedicated to all things digital and virtual is that the best ways to connect with people are surprisingly old-school. Social media tools can improve the odds of a serendipitous encounter at SXSW, but old-fashioned hustle, palm-pressing and - above all - creativity go a long way.
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Building outrageous expectations about the next big thing - be it a personal video chatting service or venue-based photo sharing app - can create all sorts of complications when things don't go as planned.