Actionable strategies to grow your audience, monetize your skills, and build leverage online. | Trusted by leaders at Google, Adobe, Meta

Hi, I’m Ryan. I help high performers become founders by using LinkedIn to build real, profitable businesses.

My career didn’t fall apart. I didn’t burn out. I finished every role cleanly - Director, VP - leading hundreds of engineers across the world and helping build multiple billion‑dollar companies.

And still, I knew I wanted to build on my own.

I’ve founded 5 companies and earned multiple exits while scaling teams behind $1B+ in outcomes. I loved the work, but I wanted a life where I could build big things and be present for my family. I wanted ownership. I wanted flexibility. I wanted proof I could do it on my terms.

LinkedIn became the path. I grew from 1,200 to 100,000+ followers in nine months, built a brand that opened doors I didn’t know existed, and stepped fully into my own business.

Since then, I’ve coached 50+ founders to design careers, income streams, and opportunities that match the life they actually want - not the life their company dictates.

Here’s how we work:

- Identify the opportunities you can’t see in your past experience.
- Build a clear, practical brand that attracts the right people.
- Turn your skills into simple offers, real customers, and predictable income.

Today, I own my time. I build, coach, and spend my days with my family - and help others do the same.

If you’re a high performer who wants a business that fits your life, DM me.
Partnerships, speaking, press: ryan@ryanyockey.com

Professional highlights:
• 5× Founder | Multiple exits
• Scaled teams responsible for $1B+ outcomes
• Grew to 100,000+ followers in 9 months
• Coached 50+ founders
• Trusted by leaders at Google, Adobe, Meta

Ryan Yockey

Change is scary. Starting over is scarier.

Most people avoid both.

And stay exactly where they are.

Here's what I've learned watching people build:

The caterpillar doesn't negotiate with the cocoon.
It surrenders to it completely.

That's the part nobody tells you about growth:

→ You don't transform by adding more.
→ You transform by letting go first.

The job that didn't work out wasn't a failure.
The idea that collapsed wasn't wasted.
The version of you that didn't make it — needed to go.

Most people want the butterfly.
They just want to skip the dissolving.

That's not how it works.

The discomfort you're avoiding right now?

That's the process.

That's what I write about every Saturday.

Want to know if your LinkedIn profile is holding back the next version of you?

I'll send you a free Loom walkthrough — I'll tell you exactly what's killing your growth.

Drop your profile link in the comments or grab a spot here: https://lnkd.in/gUMT6k_g

I help high performers build businesses on LinkedIn | From 1,200 → 140K followers in 12 months | Coaching + Newsletter for founders who want out

Most people dismiss their biggest dreams.

Not because they're impossible.

Because they sound crazy out loud.

I know the feeling.

I spent 12 years climbing someone else's ladder — VP titles, good salary, the whole picture.

On paper, it made sense.
Inside, it felt like I was disappearing.

The idea of walking away felt irrational to everyone around me.

To me, it felt like the only option.

That gap? That's where every real entrepreneur I know has lived.

Most people never cross it.

They wait for the idea to feel safer.
They wait for someone to tell them it's okay.
They wait until the timing is better.

The timing never gets better.

Here's what I've learned building a business 141,000+ entreprenuers:
→ The dream that embarrasses you in a room full of people is usually the one worth chasing
→ "Crazy" is just what conviction looks like before it has proof
→ The people who crossed that gap didn't wait for certainty — they decided the discomfort of staying was worse than the risk of going
→ Your idea doesn't need to make sense to everyone else — it only needs to make sense to you

The entire point of life is to take chances on dreams that seem crazy to most — but feel like destiny to you.

If your LinkedIn profile still reflects who you used to be — not who you're becoming —

I'll personally audit it on Loom and show you exactly what to fix.

https://lnkd.in/gUMT6k_g

Stay unreasonable.

Stay locked into your growth.

No time for noise.
No time for comparison.
No time for reacting to things that don’t matter.

Just you and what you’re building.

Most people don’t stall because they lack ability.
They stall because their attention is scattered.

Scrolling.
Second-guessing.
Watching other people play a different game.

The ones who make real progress?

They’re not louder.
They’re not busier.

They’re focused.

I learned this the hard way.

When my growth slowed, my attention was everywhere.
When things started compounding, my attention narrowed.

The difference wasn’t effort.
It wasn’t talent.

It was what I stopped giving energy to.

Discipline isn’t doing more.
It’s removing everything that doesn’t compound.

Your growth doesn’t need motivation.
It needs protection.

Everything else is distraction.

Every Saturday morning, I send one focused email to 134,000+ entrepreneurs.

One idea.
One system.
No fluff.

It takes 4 minutes to read.
It’s free.
And it’s designed to help you keep building while others drift.

Join here: https://lnkd.in/gfyweeTM

Stay locked in.
Keep building.

I’ve been watching people for years. The patterns are wild.

The loudest person in the room? Usually compensating.

The flashiest? Probably broke or close to it.

The one who won’t shut up about how smart they are? Not that smart.

Here’s what I’ve noticed about people who actually have it:

The strongest are gentle.
They don’t need to intimidate. Their presence does the work.

The smartest are quiet.
They listen more than they talk. They know they don’t know everything.

The wealthiest are simple.
No logos. No flex. Just compound interest and time freedom.

The happiest are private.
They’re not performing for an audience. They’re living for themselves.

Real power doesn’t need to prove itself.

It just exists.

The person who’s actually built something doesn’t need to tell you about it every five minutes.
Their results speak.

The person who’s actually confident doesn’t need external validation.
They’ve done the internal work.

If you find yourself constantly trying to prove your worth, your intelligence, your success—pause.

Ask yourself who you’re trying to convince.

Because the people who’ve made it?
They stopped performing a long time ago.

They just started building in silence.

That’s what I write about every Saturday. One short note to 140,000+ entrepreneurs who care more about real progress than public applause.

It takes 4 minutes.

And its free: https://lnkd.in/gfyweeTM

No noise.
Just the work.

graphical user interface, text, application, chat or text message

I turned down $250K because of what Charlie Munger taught me.

The offer was simple: consult for a company selling overpriced courses to desperate entrepreneurs. Easy money. I needed it.

But I kept thinking about Munger's rule: "Don't sell anything you wouldn't buy yourself."

Would I buy their $5K course? No.

Would I recommend it to a friend? Hell no.

So why would I help them sell it?

The internal war was brutal. I had payroll coming up. My savings were thin. This one deal would solve everything.

But every time I tried to justify it, I felt sick.

I said no.

The next month was terrifying. I scrambled. I took smaller projects. I ate ramen more than I'd like to admit.

Then something shifted.

When you stop chasing money that feels wrong, you create space for opportunities that feel right.

Six months later, I landed a client whose product I genuinely believed in. The work energized me. The money came anyway.

Now I use Munger's rule as my filter for everything:

Would I buy this?
Would I use this?
Would I recommend this to someone I care about?

If the answer is no, I walk.

It's the most expensive filter I've ever used.

And the most profitable.

Every Saturday morning, I send one focused email to 135,000+ entrepreneurs about doing exactly that. 

Designed to help you build more by doing less. 

It takes 4 minutes to read.
It’s free. 
Join here: https://lnkd.in/gfyweeTM

The dream is the proof.

Most people treat their idea like a problem.

Too risky. Too big. Too far from where they are now.

So they shrink it.

They find a more "realistic" version and call it wisdom.

But here's what I've watched happen over and over:

The people who can't stop thinking about something — even when it makes no sense — are the ones who were supposed to do it.

The obsession isn't random.

It's directional.

The dream didn't show up to torture you.

It showed up because you're one of the few people built to carry it.

Most people quiet that voice.

The ones who don't?

→ They stop needing other people's permission
→ They stop waiting until conditions are perfect
→ They stop treating the dream like a liability

The hardest part isn't the work.

It's deciding the dream deserves to be taken seriously.

141K people chose to take theirs seriously.

If you're ready to be taken seriously too — your LinkedIn profile is where that starts.

I'll tell you exactly what's holding it back: https://lnkd.in/gkDvugyj

What dream are you still sitting on?

Everyone you admire online looked ridiculous once.

Most of them will never tell you that.

14 months ago I had 1,200 connections from 10 years of doing nothing.

A resume for a profile.

Content so bad I cringe thinking about it.

I kept going anyway.

Today I have 141,000+ followers built almost entirely through that same profile.

The people who eventually look polished didn't skip the beginner phase.

They stayed in it longer than everyone else.

Most people quit right before the compounding kicks in.

Not because they lack talent.

Because they can't tolerate looking bad on the way to getting good.
→ The rep builds the skill
→ The skill builds the confidence
→ The confidence builds the result

You don't find your voice by waiting until it's perfect.

You find it by posting the imperfect thing anyway.

If your profile still looks like mine did 14 months ago — I'll show you exactly what to fix.

Free audit: https://lnkd.in/gkDvugyj

Fractional CFO | Helping Founders Scale Beyond $2M ARR with Strategic Finance & OKRs | Founder @ FounderFirst

There's a point where you just can't wing it anymore.

Usually around $2M ARR.

When growth is real, but messy. When the business works (but the numbers don't fully add up). When pricing gets risky, hiring gets heavy, and suddenly every "quick decision" starts showing up in your burn.

That's where I come in.

I step in as your Fractional CFO to help turn momentum into structure.

We build pricing, capital allocation, operating constraints, and targets the team actually runs on.

Over the last decade, I've worked with 20+ early and growth-stage companies, both VC-backed and bootstrapped, across SaaS, fintech, edtech, and agencies. I've helped scale revenue from $500K to $20M, grow teams from 10 to 200+, and build finance and ops foundations from scratch.

I've been in the room for pivots, layoffs, down rounds, near-bankruptcies, and exits - not as an observer, but owning the financial logic behind what happened next.

In 2024, I founded FounderFirst to go deeper with this work, helping teams build finance that actually supports growth, long before they're ready for a full-time CFO. Since then, we've partnered with 70+ founder-led startups and SMBs, including leading accelerators and venture studios.

That's the professional story. Here's the real one.

I grew up in Dimitrovgrad, Bulgaria - no English, no tech exposure, no obvious path.

At 17, I taught myself English.
At 19, I earned a scholarship to study in the U.S.

I arrived with a suitcase, less than $300, and no backup plan, and did whatever scrappy thing it took to stay afloat.

Eventually, I found my way into startups. The chaos, the ownership, the pressure, for the first time, I felt like I fit.

What started as survival became a decade of building behind the scenes.

Now I bring all of it - the scrappiness, the strategy, and the systems - to founders who are ready for real financial leadership.

When I'm not deep in spreadsheets or board decks, you'll find me hiking a national park or nose-deep in a book. (Always open to recommendations.)

If the next set of decisions actually matters, let's talk: https://bit.ly/3NEYTqT

Mariya Valeva

Jeff Bezos always left one chair empty in Amazon meetings.
That chair was for the most important person in the room:
the customer.

Not as a gimmick.
Not as a story to tell on podcasts.
But as a forcing function.
Every strategy discussion.
Every product decision.
Every uncomfortable trade-off.

All of it had to start with one question:
“How does this serve the customer?”
That empty chair is a reminder most companies forget once they start scaling.
Amazon didn’t.

Bezos built the company around four principles that sound simple, but are brutally hard to live by:

1. Customer obsession
Not competitor obsession. Not internal politics.
The customer always came first, even when it hurt in the short term.

2. Long-term thinking
Bezos was willing to look “wrong” for years if it meant being right for decades.
Short-term pain was the price of long-term advantage.

3. Relentless innovation
“If it’s not broken, break it anyway.”
Amazon didn’t wait for disruption - it created it, often cannibalizing its own successes before someone else could.

4. High standards
“Good enough” was never good enough.
Because standards, once lowered, almost never come back up.

The lesson isn’t to copy Amazon.
It’s to steal the discipline.

Ask yourself:
- Who is the “empty chair” in your leadership meetings?
- What gets optimized when no one is watching?
- Are your decisions serving today’s comfort or tomorrow’s customer?

Culture isn’t what you say you value.
It’s what your decisions protect when trade-offs appear.
And the empty chair makes sure you never forget that.

*video credits: simplyougrow insta

Fractional CFO for B2B SaaS ($2M+ ARR) | Founder @FounderFirst

Most founders think startups fail because of bad ideas.
In reality, they fail because of three decisions made early on.

1. The wrong co-founder
The biggest risk isn’t lack of talent.
It’s lack of integrity.
A smart, high-energy partner without integrity doesn’t move the company forward - they slowly break trust, alignment, and decision-making.
And once that cracks, everything else follows.

2. Obsessing over the idea instead of the market
Founders spend months polishing the “perfect” idea.
But the idea is rarely the bottleneck.
A large, fast-growing market can absorb mistakes, pivots, and imperfect products.
A small market won’t forgive even great execution.

3. Raising money before building something
Many founders start with fundraising.
The better path is simpler:
Build an MVP.
Put it in front of real users.
See if anyone actually cares.
Because funding doesn’t fix weak products.
It just amplifies what already exists.
If the product works → capital accelerates it.
If it doesn’t → capital scales the problem.

The fundamentals of startups are surprisingly simple.
But simple doesn’t mean easy.

*Video credits: growasentrepreneurs insta

Steve Jobs once said he envied Alexander the Great.
Not for the empire.
But for his mentor.

Alexander had Aristotle by his side - someone he could question, challenge, and learn from directly.
Jobs could read everything Aristotle ever wrote…
but he could never ask him a question.

In 1985, while visiting Sweden, Jobs shared a vision:
What if one day we could build machines that simulate the thinking of great minds?
Machines that allow us to ask Aristotle a question.
Or Einstein.
Or Da Vinci.
Not just read their ideas - but interact with them.

Nearly 40 years later, large language models are the closest thing we’ve come to that idea.
We’re starting to move from static knowledge to interactive knowledge.
From reading history…
to having conversations with it.

The real question now isn’t whether the technology works.
It’s how we choose to use it.

Because tools that expand human thinking can either:
- amplify wisdom
- or amplify noise

The responsibility is ours.

*Video credits: foundedarchive insta

16 restaurants closed.
456 people without a job.
And the business was still making £190m.

That’s what happened to TGIF’s UK business.
But this wasn’t a sudden January collapse.
It was a structural failure that finally became visible.

On the outside, nothing looked dramatic.
The brand was still there.
Customers were still walking in.
Revenue hadn’t fallen off a cliff.
But somewhere between Christmas trading and year-end numbers, the decision had already been made..

→ The warning sign wasn’t decline. It was “fine.”
TGIF UK revenue was only down ~3% YoY.
In hospitality, that’s not stability.
That’s erosion hiding in plain sight.
Flat revenue in an inflationary year quietly destroys margin.

→ Costs rose where flexibility didn’t exist
UK casual dining absorbed:
- 8–10%+ labour inflation
- Energy costs that reset permanently higher
- Business rates and rents locked into long leases
These aren’t costs you can “optimize” away.
They compound whether sales grow or not.

→ Pricing power lagged reality
TGIF UK couldn’t raise prices fast enough without losing volume.
So instead of passing costs on, margins absorbed the shock - month after month.
Nothing broke loudly.
It just kept getting tighter.

→ The estate was built for a different world
Many UK locations were legacy bets:
- Pre-Covid footfall assumptions
- Shopping centres and edge-of-town sites
- High fixed rent relative to sales
Some sites weren’t underperforming.
They were structurally wrong.
Those 16 closures weren’t sudden failures - they were the tail that had been dragging the whole business down.

→ Debt removed time
The UK operator was carrying ~£25–30m of net debt.
That meant:
- Free cash went to survival, not reinvention
- Refurbs slowed
- Systems aged
- Optionality disappeared
Debt doesn’t kill businesses.
It kills waiting.

→ Now, let’s move to the US business
Same brand. Same menu. Same logo.
Very different outcome.
In the US, TGIF had already shifted risk outward:
- Heavier franchising
- Fewer corporate leases
- More royalty-based income
- Less balance-sheet exposure
When costs rose, pain was fragmented across franchisees.
In the UK, it pooled centrally.
That’s why the US survived.
Not because it was healthier, but because it was structured to absorb failure.

→ January forced the reset
By early 2026, there was no gradual fix left.
So the solution wasn’t a turnaround plan.
It was a pre-pack administration:
- 16 loss-making sites closed
- Estate reduced to 33 restaurants
- 456 jobs lost, ~1,384 preserved
- Business reset under the global TGIF brand owner

This wasn’t brand failure.
It was financial triage.

Brands don’t fail evenly.
They fail where rigidity meets leverage,
and geography decides where the damage shows up first.

If your revenue went flat tomorrow,
would you know which part of your business would break,
or would you find out in January?

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Ryan Yockey

Mariya Valeva

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The Battle

Ryan Yockey

Mariya Valeva

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Engagements

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Ryan Yockey's LinkedIn Performance

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Performance ScoreRyan Yockey's LinkedIn Performance