Ryan Duffy
About
Welcome to internet homepage. Here's a ~4 minute read with an overview of who I am and what I've done and some other random stuff.🛰️ I am Head of Commercial BD at Array Labs, a space startup in Silicon Valley. We're creating the world's first living, breathing 3D map of Earth by developing, launching, and flying orbital rings of tiny, cheap, and cooperative space radars. Our distributed, formation-flying satellite constellation is architected to simulate a massive array in space - to put it in simpler terms, we're effectively building the largest sensor ever known to mankind. It's gonna be awesome...
🤠 By nights and weekends, I run Duffy Industries, a strategic storytelling advisory firm. That corporatespeak descriptor really doesn't do the nature of the work justice, but that's okay, as we don't need to sell the services. Duffy Industries is rate-limited/capacity-constrained by the day job. In any event, when I was full-time on it, Duffy Industries worked with founders, engineers, and VCs building cool sh*t (deep learning algos for the real world, rendezvous spacecraft, nuclear fusion reactors, longevity products, and more).
priors
☕ Proud, card-carrying member of the Morning Brew mafia. Was very early (Employee #10) at the Brew, where I founded, wrote, and scaled the company's second-ever product. Then known as Emerging Tech Brew, the product quickly grew to become one of the largest tech newsletters in the world, with 300,000+ subscribers and $xM+ in annual revenue prior to my departure. My baby would become the blueprint for the next half dozen B2B products, and while at the Brew, I helped lead our expansion out of the inbox via tech deep dives and research MVPs.🚀 After le Brew, I was the founding and managing editor of Payload, a startup and media brand that quickly grew to be one of the most popular outlets serving the space industry. While at Payload, I launched our flagship daily newsletter, hired the newsroom, managed a team spread across three continent, and was host of the Pathfinder podcast.🔮 A few times, I penned Cybermonk, a personal newsletter on emerging technology. It is effectively defunct but may be reincarnated down the road.
Eyes in the sky
🚁 I'm the proprietor and pilot of Ryan Air™. We go everywhere together. Ryan Air has flown on three continents and taken enough pics to fry multiple hard drives. If you're a Fed reading this, Ryan Air and its pilot are FAA-certified.💸 I sell prints of a few of Ryan Air's choice shots online. If you're reading this, chances are you happened across Ryan Duffy online and don't really know me. Or, you do know about me, and you're trying to do your due diligence before we have some sort of non-transactional interaction. In any event, if you want to support me, buy a print!!!!!
wordsmanship
✍️ My writing has appeared in the NYT, Fast Company, the Verge, and the Texas Tribune, among other publications.📚 While I've worked predominantly in the ephemeral and fast-moving world of newsletters, I have also moonlighted as a longform writer. Selected works:
🎄 I once went Very Longform, writing a 140-page honors thesis comparing the Kyoto and Montreal Protocols (climate change, ozone depletion, respectively). How and why this happened are unsolved mysteries, but it was a seminal academic moment. My climate writing received honorable mention in the Elie Wiesel Foundation Prize in Ethics essay contest.🔎 I am a contemporary trend observer and moonlight as an occasional powerpoint pundit. Please don't hurt me for this.
miscellaneous
📍 Born in Bahston, raised in Texas, returned to Boston for school, previously lived in NYC + DC. For the last ~5yrs, living in Austin, land of open skies, taco trucks, live music, and unsustainable population inflows. Spend loads of time in SFBA at Array HQ (Palo Alto) and traveling for work.
✈️ Have also lived in Europe and the Middle East, and extensively traveled through both regions (these epochs sadly predate Ryan Air™). The photo you above was taken by Ryan Ground.
🎓 Back in the day, I attended The University of Texas at Austin and Boston College University (aka UT + BC).🏃 I'm a recovering competitive runner. I won the 800 Meters race in my high school's track & field championships, earned bronze in the 1600 roughly an hour later, and then placed in the top 3 in the immediate next event with my 4x400 squad. After that much lactic acid, and so many laps around a big circle, I was ready to quite literally hang up the competitive running cleats for good. Running PRs:
❤️ Re: running, and charitable works, I'm most proud of running the Boston Marathon in 2016 with the Dana Farber team and raising $12,500 for basic cancer research, in honor of my late Aunt Cathy.💥 A few years later, I started running a mile a day and ran for 1,022 days in a row. The streak ended not due to injury or illness but because I simply forgot to run one day. Anticlimactic much?
and finally...
💅 I am an inveterate memer. Duffy Memes is a division of Duffy Industries, and a holding company for a meme consultancy, shitposting agency, and e-think tank. Note: none of that is actually real, though Duffy Memes is a revenue-generating operations.
Chuck E Cheese's real mistake was going off the gold standard pic.twitter.com/ck55Ae3gXy
— Ryan Duffy (@Ryandoofy) June 25, 2020
📈 Selected works via Twitter / TikTok (note that I am no longer on the latter because I think it is PRC espionage)Thanks for reading! If you'd like to get in touch, drop me a line.