Rob Ryan
Rob Ryan (born 1948) is the founder of Ascend Communications and Entrepreneur America. Ryan earned national attention when he grew his 1989 start-up company, Ascend Communications, Inc., to more than $500 million in sales by 1995. Lucent Technologies acquired Ascend in 1999 for $23 billion, in what was termed the "largest technology merger ever."Ryan received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1969 from Cornell University and began his career as a systems analyst with Burroughs, then worked at Lawrence Livermore Lab on the first non-military extension of Arpanet, the precursor to the Internet. In the late 1970s he was the principal architect of DecNet and the Intel portion of the Ethernet specification while working at Digital Equipment Corp. in the Boston area. He founded Softcom, Inc. in the early 1980s; sold it in two years to Hayes Microcomputer Products, Inc. and worked there as Director of Research and Development until the late 1980s.