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Who

One of the most prominent tech executives in New York, Ryan helped turn DoubleClick into the preeminent internet advertising company. These days he's the chairman and CEO of AlleyCorp, a network of six affiliated Internet companies.

Backstory

Raised in Geneva and Rome, Ryan went to college at Yale, and returned to Europe to earn his MBA at INSEAD. He had early stints at Euro Disney, the syndication service United Media, and the US and UK offices of Prudential where he worked in the investment banking division. He joined a nascent DoubleClick—which co-founders Kevin O'Connor and Dwight Merriman had set up the previous year—as president in 1996. The company grew explosively during the late '90s, emerging as the dominant player in the still relatively uncharted field of online advertising. In 2000, when Kevin O'Connor stepped down as CEO, Ryan replaced him. He took the job at a relatively inauspicious moment: DoubleClick's sky-high shares tanked following the dot-com crash of 2000-'01. But under Ryan's control, the company become one of the few Silicon Alley concerns to survive the meltdown, and DoubleClick soon bounced back—in 2005 Ryan negotiated the deal to sell the company to the private equity firm Hellman and Friedman for $1.1 billion. Hellman and Friedman, in turn, flipped it to Google for $3.1 billion in April 2007.

Of note

Even before he exited DoubleClick, Ryan had been directing his Internet riches to various tech startups. He was an early investor in HotJobs, for example, which Yahoo! bought for $450 million in 2002. In 2005, along with Eliot Horowitz and DoubleClick co-founder Dwight Merriman, Ryan founded the shopping search engine ShopWiki; he also co-founded the music site MusicNation and content delivery network Panther Express. These days, he's chairman and CEO of AlleyCorp, a network of six affiliated Internet companies, including the Henry Blodget-edited Silicon Alley Insider, and the fashion site Gilt.com.

Board game

Ryan serves on the board of Human Rights Watch and the New York City Investment Fund, along with Fred Wilson, Steve Schwarzman, Jerry Speyer, Henry Kravis, and Partnership for NYC chief Kathryn Wylde, among others.

Personal

Ryan is married to INSEAD classmate Pascaline Servan-Schreiber; they have three kids. Servan-Schreiber is director of new media for SI for Kids. Ryan and family live in the West 60s.