This blog is written and maintained by Ryan Janssen. I guess my journey can be seen as a slow progression (regression?) from a highly idealized world-view to a rigorously empirical one. I got into an evangelical brand of Christianity when I was in middle school, went to an evangelical college (Wheaton College) in 1990 where I rather quickly found the Christian belief system impossible to maintain. I became a philosophy major and studied the evolution of western belief systems from the Pre-Socratics through 20th century post-modernism. In 1994, I started a Ph.D. program in 19th and 20th century continental philosophy at SUNY-Stony Brook (one of about 4 American Universities at the time with graduate programs with a European emphasis). I left after 2 years feeling I’d learned about all I could in an academic setting, with my only regret being that I really enjoyed teaching.
I left graduate school with the express intent of better understanding social power structures (my chosen field of study) by participating fully in the most powerful social power structure I knew–capitalism. I moved to Austin, TX where I started a small publishing company. After two years, I moved to NYC (to get to the heart of it) and learned how to be a cold-blooded killer at a brokerage firm (sales is the engine of capitalism). When I’d learned what I could, I left and started a highly profitable business unit at an interactive agency, got burned during the crash, and floundered for a couple of years. In 2003 I started a mobile application development company that released TagandScan (you could tag real physical locations with pictures or text) and got it released on all 5 major mobile networks in the UK. I found the US far from ready for this kind of technology, stumbled into an opportunity to build a very cool company (www.angelsoft.net) from scratch with someone else taking the financial risk and have been building it for the past 3 years.
I feel like I’m at the peak of my game right now as an entrepreneur and am looking for the next big thing. I love building rational economic sanctuaries (places where talented people can do what they care about, while being shielded from economic concerns and irrational management), and changing (unjust) social power structures through technology. I’ve started this blog because I haven’t been as public as I should be.
