ryan burkhardt is a successful entrepreneur, angel investor, and dad. in his 10 years of building world class software and businesses, he has taken on a series of roles that demand a strong combination of technical depth, business vision, and execution. ryan is currently the director of program management at IdeAgency, microsoft’s internal ‘innovation engine’.

he started his career on an entrepreneurial kick, founding a business selling custom built medical record and appointment systems. next he joined futurevision, inc. as an engineer, helping the company achieve its goal of bringing large amounts of tv content through fiber to the home while establishing the company’s web presence. all in the days when netscape was getting into the web server business and satellites dishes were at best 6’ wide...

after graduating from cornell university’s school of engineering in 1999 with a bs in computer science and minor in entrepreneurship from the johnson school of management, ryan joined microsoft. he started out working on v1 of directmusic for the directx platform, honing the api to address game developers needs.

subsequently, he took ownership of the OEM pre-installation technologies (OPK) for windows 2000. for windows XP and windows server 2003, he fundamentally redesigned the way windows is installed, significantly reducing the deployment costs of OEMs and corporations. he built and ran the program management team responsible for deployment technologies in windows, including remote installation services, setup, OPK, OS/file imaging, OS componentization, upgrade, and PC migration. he was also responsible for the design and creation of "WinPE", a minimal version of windows that has become the foundation of multiple microsoft offerings and, as a standalone product, generates over $65M/yr for the company.

he was then drafted to head up technical program management for windows XP service pack 2 (SP2) and served as a spokesperson for the worldwide press tour. the project rekindled an interest in security that started when he studied under professor fred schneider at cornell, he then became group manager in the system protection products team in microsoft's security technology unit (STU). ryan was responsible for creating the Thinc Tank – microsoft's security incubation team. the team generated dozens of ideas for security features and functionality, impacting technologies across the company.

wanting to get back to his web roots, ryan then became group program manager on the live search team, responsible for developer platform, webmaster tools, and search syndication. he and his team designed and launched v1 of the company’s webmaster portal to industry acclaim. he helped close over $30M in search syndication deals and brought the existing search api from just a soap offering to a scalable, restful interface for the modern web dev.

over the years he has presented at conferences on innovation, entrepreneurship, security, operating system deployment, and search engine optimization. he has filed 16 patents in the areas of software deployment, OS design, security, and web search. ryan lives in the seattle area with his wife, two young kids, and a dog. and if he isn’t working or getting the kids to sleep, he’d like to be golfing, reading, improving his photo skills, or cooking.