Rian Schmidt

Rian Schmidt has extensive work experience in the technology industry. Rian started their career as the President and CEO of Fine Brand Media, Inc. from 1997 to 2002. Rian then worked as a Consultant and Director of Paid Search Marketing at The New York Times, where they successfully reduced cost-per-click while increasing the budget for PPC campaigns. From 2011 to 2014, Rian was the Head of Labs Technology at Zappos, where they introduced agile development and implemented Amazon AWS cloud-based DevOps systems.

In 2014, Rian founded Circinaut, where they served as the CEO and Principal Consultant. Rian provided consulting services on application architecture, infrastructure, security, and process. Rian also conducted technical due diligence on acquisitions and investments.

In 2015, they joined Vadio, Inc as the Chief Technology Officer, where they scaled the streaming video start-up to over 100 million video views per month. Rian built a development and production environment in Google Cloud and AWS.

Rian joined Leavened in 2018 as the Chief Technology Officer, leading the engineering team in developing marketing analytics tools using cloud, machine learning, and big data technologies. Later in 2018, they also joined Rain the Growth Agency as the Chief Technology Officer. In this role, they led software development and technology operations, including SOC2 compliance, business intelligence, disaster recovery, cloud migration, and data analysis and visualization.

Throughout their career, Rian has demonstrated strong leadership skills, technical expertise, and a track record of driving innovation and success in various technology-focused roles.

Rian Schmidt has a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree in Entrepreneurship/Entrepreneurial Studies from Stanford University Graduate School of Business. Prior to that, Rian completed a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering (BEE) degree at the University of Minnesota. Additionally, Rian obtained the Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification from (ISC)² in January 2020.