Rob Ryan, the  founding CEO of Ascend Communications, and his wife Terry formed Entrepreneur America in 1995, to provide start-ups and established businesses with mentoring services that improve growth, profitability, and/or market position.  Typically we work with high technology startups whose proprietary technology provides a significant barrier to competition.  We also work with later stage companies and have made significant contributions to their strategic positioning and growth. To learn more about Entrepreneur America and our Roaring Lion^TM mentoring program see about ea.

We have been instrumental in helping a number of companies create successful businesses.  Many of these have gone public, been purchased or are on target to IPO offerings.  Our success ratio is very high relative to the usual statistics for  early stage companies .  More detail on companies we have or are currently working with can be found by looking at  Company Profiles on this site.

One of the side benefits of Rob's location in Montana is that it provides a location away from distractions for intense business discussions at:

Boot Camp: Selected entrepreneurs have the opportunity to obtain first-hand mentoring at the Entrepreneur America Boot Camp, in Montana. Boot Camp provides strategies that develop sustainable and profitable businesses.

• For new businesses, EA instructs on initial funding strategies, emphasizing the development of presentation materials.

• For established businesses, EA provides tools to recognize changes in technology, markets, and competition, and refines business strategies to succeed within these changes.

Click here to read more about the Boot Camp and the submission process required.

In addition to information on Entrepreneur America, this website provides advice and information to help you grow your business:

Entrepreneurial Information: Using software from RightNow Technologies, an EA company, this site provides an extensive set of answers to questions that entrepreneurs may have on a variety of topics related to creating and managing their business. Included in these are several tutorials focused on providing the entrepreneur with practical guidelines to important start-up topics. Excerpts from Rob's book "Smartups" are also included with that material.

Founders:

• Rob Ryan, Co-Founder/PresidentRob Ryan founded Ascend Communications in 1989. Rob served as President, CEO, and Chairman of Ascend, taking it public Friday the thirteenth of May, 1994, at $13.00 per share. In 1995 Rob and Terry started Entrepreneur America.

• Terry Ryan, Co-FounderTerry has helped Rob with the vision and development of the Entrepreneur America project since its inception.

Team EA:

• Leah Higgins, Personal Assistant for Rob Ryan

• Sandy Miller, Administrative Assistant – Entrepreneur America, Boston Office.

3. History of Entrepreneur America

Entrepreneur America is about giving something back. Rob Ryan explains in his own words:

"As an entrepreneur, I was successful. That success was, in part, due to the support of my father (and many other father figures), my mother, and my wife, who was always the wind beneath my wings. I live in a great country (good ol' US of A; don't worry, I'm not going to break into God Bless America, not yet anyhow), state (The golden hills of California's Silicon Valley. What hills? All million dollar houses now) and was fortunate enough to have a number of mentors and supporters that believed in my team and me.
I felt that I wanted to give something back to the U.S. and wanna-be entrepreneurs. It is my way of thanking the Lord and all those above for the great ride. Too many times I watched successful entrepreneurs become 'serial' entrepreneurs. I asked myself, "Do I want to do Yet Another Company (YAC)? How much money is enough?"

Instead of becoming a 'serial' entrepreneur, I decided to focus on helping what I call "entrepreneur wanna-be's" (see Chapter 1 of my Cornell University Press book, 'Smartups [Street smart start-ups] Lessons from Rob Ryan's Entrepreneur America Boot Camp for Start-Ups' September 2002). These wanna-be's all seem to experience two problems which I refer to as the "Grand Canyon Leap," and "Isolation."

The Grand Canyon Leap is about raising money for your start-up. With most entrepreneurs, this is their first hurdle--the techniques or non-techniques that entrepreneur wanna-be's use for obtaining money (see chapter 5 of my book, "Peeing in the Wells"). >From my point of view, the Grand Canyon Leap is not about money but about one's business model which in many cases defies belief: When does this thing make money?  What is the value proposition? What is the application? How do you position the company?

EA bridges that canyon by mentoring entrepreneurs and helping them develop their ideas into an effective plan.

The second problem common to entrepreneurs is isolation. For a number of reasons, entrepreneurs don't spend enough time with other entrepreneurs and a sense of isolation grows. Who do you talk to about business issues or personnel problems? From my experience, having a mentor like myself is ideal, but the chances of having me sit on your board is low (1 in 200), so where do you go? The solution is to work with other entrepreneurs and use my web site. Entrepreneur America is becoming the center for the entrepreneur community."

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