Ryan Rouse

MALK Organics

President

Self Employed

Growth Advisor

HighKey 

Chief Executive Officer (acquired)

Board Member

Chief Marketing & Ecommerce Officer

Tasseo Consumer Ecosystem

Operating Partner

Serenity Kids

Head of Growth

Factor_

Co-Founder (Acquired by Hello Fresh)

Chief Marketing Officer

Chief Operating Officer

Merrill Lynch

Vice President of Sales

Growth advisor to consumer businesses with a focus on every line of the P&L | Previously, Co-Founder at Factor Meals (acquired), CEO at Highkey

Growth-minded CPG leader with deep experience across finance, brand building, and operational leadership.

After more than a decade in finance—culminating in an eight-year tenure at Merrill Lynch—I co-founded Factor_, a ready-to-eat meal delivery company that went on to be acquired by HelloFresh for $277M in 2020.

I joined HighKey Snacks as Chief Marketing Officer and later CEO, guiding the low-sugar snack brand through rapid expansion and an acquisition in 2024.

I'm currently the President of MALK Organics, a fast-growing, near nine-figure brand redefining the plant-based milk category with its commitment to clean, organic ingredients and uncompromising quality.

Vice President | Partner

Data driven investors in early stage consumer brands. 

I used to guilt-trip employees who left at 5pm.

At Factor_, I'd send passive-aggressive Slack messages. "Must be nice to have work-life balance." 

Real asshole moves.

Then my best developer quit.

In his exit interview, he said something that stung: "Ryan, you chose to mortgage your house for this company. I didn't."

He was right.

I'd worked for no salary for three years. Maxed out credit cards. Emptied my 401k. 

That was my choice. Not theirs.

Here's what founders get wrong about employee motivation:

Your employees will never care as much as you do.

And that's fine.

You own 40% of the company. They own 0.1%.
You'll make millions if it works. They'll make rent.
Your name is on the door. Theirs is on a badge.

Stop expecting owner-level commitment from employee-level equity.

Instead, find people who give a shit about doing good work. 
Pay them well.
Respect their time.

They won't work until 2am unless it's truly necessary.

But when it is necessary? They'll be there.

Not because you guilted them.

Because you earned it.

Never Been on a Forbes List | President at MALK Organics | Daddy at Rouse House | Previously: Co-Founder & CMO at Factor_, CEO at Highkey

Everyone thinks they're behind schedule.

32 and no VP title yet. 35 without a successful exit. 40 and still figuring shit out.

Meanwhile, I'm 46.

Factor_ sold for $277M but didn't get the payday everyone assumes.
Scaled HighKey to $60M+ in 3 years then watched it fail to sell.
Now running MALK at nearly 9 figures.

And some mornings I still wonder if I'm doing this right.

We're all racing some imaginary clock.

Comparing our Tuesday to someone else's highlight reel. Measuring our mess against their manufactured success story.

But business isn't a sprint where everyone starts at the same line.

Some people inherit the track.
Some start in the parking lot.
Some are still looking for their shoes.

The only schedule that matters is the one where you're still moving forward.

Even if it's slower than you planned.
Even if you're taking detours.
Even if everyone else seems to be lapping you.

Because the ones who last aren't the ones who peaked at 30.

They're the ones who kept showing up at 40. 50. 60.

Still building. Still learning. Still getting their ass kicked by problems they've never seen before.

Your timeline isn't broken.

You're just comparing your documentary to everyone else's movie trailer.

Keep going.

Everyone shits on corporate jobs now. Like it's some kind of badge of honor.

"I escaped the 9-5!"
"No more soul-sucking meetings!"
"Finally free from corporate hell!"

Cool story.

I spent 12 years in corporate before Factor_. Before any of this.

Know what those years taught me?

How to read a P&L when it actually mattered.
How to present to people who didn't give a shit about my feelings.
How to manage up, down, and sideways without losing my mind.
How to navigate politics without becoming political.

Merrill Lynch taught me a lot of basic shit many people struggle with.

How to run a meeting. Structure a team. Build a budget that made sense.

I needed those 12 years of structure before I could properly break things.

I needed to understand the rules before I could ignore them.

Corporate taught me discipline. Entrepreneurship taught me courage.

You need both.



P.S. For more of the real and raw of building brands, subscribe to my newsletter. Link in the comments.

My wife hated 90% of Factor_ meals.

We'd mortgaged our future to fund the company. Maxed out credit cards. Bet everything.

You'd think that would make her our biggest cheerleader.

Nope.

"This chicken tastes like cardboard."
"Why is this sauce so sweet?"
"I wouldn't order this again."

Meanwhile, we're shipping 10,000+ meals a week. Customers telling us we changed their lives.

But my wife? Still complaining about the seasoning.

It drove me insane.

Until I realized she was teaching me the most expensive lesson in business:

Your product isn't for everyone.

And that's exactly how it should be.

We had customers who cried when their delivery was late because they loved our meals that much.

And we had my wife microwaving a frozen pizza instead.

Both realities can exist.

The mistake founders make? Trying to convert the haters.

Tweaking the recipe. Changing the packaging. Watering down what made you special.

All to please people who were never going to love you anyway.

F*ck that.

Double down on the people who get it.

The ones who tell their friends. Who post about you without being asked. Who panic when you're out of stock.

Those are your people.

Everyone else? Let them eat frozen pizza.

Your job isn't to make everyone happy.

It's to make the right people obsessed.

Want to become irreplaceable at a startup?

Master Google, ChatGPT, etc.

I'm serious.

At Merrill Lynch, I was 1 of 75,000 employees. Could've been the best analyst on Wall Street. Still replaceable.

At Factor_? Different game.

My superpower wasn't an MBA or some fancy framework.

It was knowing how to find shit fast.

When my co-founder asked "How do other meal delivery companies handle returns?"

Everyone else: "Let me schedule some calls."

Me: Ordered from 3 of them and submitted a return. Pulled their policies. Built a framework.

Here's what most people don't get:

Founders already know how to find shit on their own. That's how they got this far.

They're not asking you because they're lazy. They're asking because they're drowning.

Be the person who brings solutions, not more questions.

The employee who says "I researched this, here are three options, I recommend X because Y" becomes indispensable.

The one who says "I don't know, what do you think?" becomes overhead.

At early stage companies, resourcefulness beats credentials every time.

Because there's no playbook. No precedent. No "how we've always done it."

Just problems that need solving. Fast.

Get good at finding answers.

The founders will notice.

The best marketing manager I ever worked with took a 15-year break to raise her kids.

She was a sponge. Could learn, absorb, understand, and apply thing very quickly, 

Why?

Because she'd already managed harder problems. Like getting three kids fed, dressed, and out the door by 7am. Every day. For 15 years.

The skills don't show up on a resume:

- Crisis management (toddler meltdowns)
- Budget optimization (feeding a family on one income)
- Project management (coordinating three kids' schedules)
- Conflict resolution (sibling warfare)

Give me someone who's navigated that for years over someone who's only navigated corporate politics.

They don't need work-life balance. They invented it.

They're battle-tested.

They’re resilient. 

Character traits that are essential in early stage brands.

Stop reading books by billionaires.

When I was starting Factor_, I devoured every Bezos interview. Every Musk biography. Every "How I Built a Billion Dollar Empire" podcast.

Super interesting, but not useful. 

Know what actually helped?

Talking to the founder who was 18 months ahead of us. Same market. Same problems. Same shit show.

He told me which vendors would screw us. Which hires to avoid. How to look out for the different revenue and head count levels when everything breaks.

That saved me more than any masterclass.

Here's why billionaire advice doesn't work:

They solved different problems in a different era with different resources.

Bezos had Wall Street connections. You have a maxed out credit card.
Jobs had Wozniak. You have a freelancer in Poland.
Musk had PayPal money. You have ramen.

Their advice is like getting flight instructions from an astronaut when you're learning to ride a bike.

Find someone 2-3 steps ahead. Not 200.

They remember what it's like to not sleep because payroll is tomorrow.
They know which growth hacks actually work with no budget.
They're dealing with the same regulations that just changed.

At HighKey, our best advisor wasn't the guy who sold for $500M.

It was the founder doing $15M when we were at $5M.

Close enough to remember. Far enough to have answers.

Your problems aren't unique. Someone solved them last year.

Find them.

I don't need my team to like me.

But I lose sleep over whether I'm making them better.

Got a text last week from someone who worked for me at Highkey four years ago. 

She's now a VP at a well known CPG brand.

"I appreciate the impact your leadership had on my life and how it transformed how I lead my marketing team today." 

That's the review I want.

I've had bosses everyone loved.
Great at happy hours.
Remembered birthdays. 
Never pushed too hard.

They were forgettable.

The ones who changed my trajectory? They made me uncomfortable. 

Called out my blind spots. Refused to let me coast.

Being liked is easy. Just lower the bar. Accept mediocre work. Avoid hard conversations.

Being respected is harder. It means pushing people past what they think they can do.

Five years from now, they won't remember if you were fun at the Christmas party.

They'll remember if you helped them become who they wanted to be.

Your job as a leader isn't to collect friends.

It's to build careers.

I've sat through 100+ board meetings.

The person with the best idea rarely speaks first. Or loudest.

They're usually scribbling notes while others debate. Processing. 

Connecting dots the room hasn't seen yet.

At Highkey, our CFO barely spoke in meetings. Drove me crazy at first.

Then I started asking him directly: "What are we missing?"

His answers saved us millions.

Volume creates the illusion of value.

But the most expensive mistakes I've made came from confusing confidence with clarity.

Now I'm very deliberate about asking the quiet ones.

"What do you think?"

Strong opinions loosely held beat loud opinions blindly followed.

Every time.

Most operators are addicted to complexity.

AI-powered this. Machine learning that. Attribution models that need a PhD to understand.

Meanwhile, they can't ship product on time.

At HighKey, we burned $500K on "advanced inventory management software."

Know what actually fixed our supply chain issues?

A Google Sheet and a daily standup.

That's it.

Here's what I've learned scaling three companies:

Complexity is where mediocre operators hide.

Can't hit your sales targets? Build a more sophisticated CRM.
Team communication sucks? Add another Slack integration.
Product quality issues? Implement a 47-point QA process.

Nope.

Because you haven't earned complexity yet.

You earn it by proving you can execute the basics. Repeatedly. Boringly. Without drama.

At MALK, I killed three "strategic initiatives" my first month.

Not because they were bad ideas. Because we couldn't even nail our production schedule yet.

Why were we talking about those things when we couldn't forecast demand yet?

The best operators I know are almost religious about simplicity.

They ask: "What's the simplest version that could work?"

Then they execute that until it's automatic.

Your competition isn't beating you with better tools.

They're beating you because they ship on time. Answer their emails. Make a product that works.

Every. Single. Day.

Master the boring basics first.

The fancy shit can wait.

"Enjoy the journey" is the worst advice you can give a founder.

I know because everyone gave it to me.

At Factor_, working 90-hour weeks, someone would say "Remember to enjoy the process!"

Yeah, right. I was too busy trying not to go bankrupt.

You can't enjoy drowning while you're drowning. You're just trying to breathe.

Same with my kids. Parents with grown children always tell me: "It goes so fast. Enjoy every moment."

They're looking back from the summit. I'm still carrying a toddler up the mountain.

Of course it looks beautiful from up there. You're not covered in sweat and goldfish crackers anymore.

The truth nobody admits?

You won't fully appreciate the hard parts until they're over.

And that's fine. 

Because during, you're just trying to survive.

Don't get me wrong. 
You should try to be present. 
You should look for moments of gratitude.

But stop beating yourself up for not loving every second of the grind.

The gratitude comes later. 

When you've got the bandwidth for it.


~~~~~~~~~

If you liked this post, you might like my emails. No BS musings from being in the trenches building brands since 2012. 

Link in the comments 👇

You don't need more advice.

You need perspective.

From someone who's been in the trenches, not just the boardroom.

I'm launching a newsletter. Here's why:

I co-founded Factor_. We sold it for $277M. Sounds great on LinkedIn, right?

What I don't post: I lost my mind (and almost my marriage) during the process. Also didn't get a large payday. 

I helped scale HighKey to $60M+ in 3 years. Another win for the highlight reel.

What I don't share: We went through a failed process. 

Now I'm the President at MALK Organics. Almost 9 figures in revenue. Profitable. Growing like crazy.

But some days I still feel like I'm winging it.

This newsletter isn't another "5 tips to scale your startup" waste of time.

It's the unfiltered truth about building brands:

• Why your "strategic plan" is probably bullshit
• What to do when everything's on fire (because it will be)
• How to grow without losing your mind (mostly)
• The mistakes I'm still making so you don't have to
• Real stories from the trenches, not the podium

Part playbook. Part therapy session. Part reminder that we're all figuring it out.

For anyone trying to build something real while keeping their sanity intact.

Because scaling a business is great.

But if you can't sleep, think straight, or laugh at the chaos—what's the point?

Link in comments.

Let's do this.

Clear priorities at work = actually being present at dinner. Here's my system.

I pick three things. Not thirty. Three.

Every Sunday night, I write them on a Post-it. Stick it to my monitor.

Very analogue, I know. (I am a Gen-X'er after all.)

Everything else is noise until those three are done.

Three things that actually move the business forward.
Not busy work. Not fake emergencies.
Real needle-movers.

When someone comes with their hair on fire about something not on my list?

"Is this more important than X, Y, or Z?"

Usually, it's not. 

If it is, deal with it but pause to ask the question if you need to be involved or if you've trained your team to come to you with everything.

The magic isn't in what you prioritize.

It's in what you're willing to ignore.

Most "urgent" shit fixes itself. Or wasn't urgent to begin with.

But dinner with your family? That's actually urgent.

You just don't realize it until they stop inviting you.

Your team doesn't need you to do everything.

They need you to do the right things.

And then go home.

Transparency isn't about being nice. It's about being smart.

At Factor_, I kept the P&L locked in a boardroom. Only executives saw them.

I now realize I was asking people to win a game without showing them the scoreboard.

At MALK, I expose as many people as possible to our financials. 

Because when people understand the business, they make business decisions.

When they're kept in the dark, they make assumptions.

Usually expensive ones.

You want an owner mentality? Show them what owners see.

Most won't care. But the ones who do?

Those are your future leaders.

Got this message yesterday from a newsletter subscriber.

Made me stop and read it again.

"Instead of paying for 1 hour with someone who had a $200M exit, I found a mentor 1-2 years ahead of me for free."

That line.

She gets it.

See, I write about this stuff constantly. Find someone 2-3 steps ahead, not 200. The astronaut can't teach you to ride a bike.

But seeing someone actually do it? 

That hits different.

She also wrote: "I've hired an agency to help me put systems in place that work without me and I'm focusing on the 20% that drives revenue not the 80% of busy tasks."

This founder's implementing faster than most people read.

No analysis paralysis. No waiting for perfect. Just taking ideas and running with them.

Then she said this: "I hope you are working on a book! I'd love to buy it."

Maybe the best compliment I could get. 

I started a newsletter to provide raw thoughts from the trenches. No polish. No "5 steps to scale your business" BS.

Just real problems and what actually worked.

The shit I wish someone had told me at Factor_. At HighKey. 

And apparently, it's working.

One leader at a time.

Link in the comments if this hit you in the feels.

There's something magnetic about leaders who don't need you to know they're in charge.

When I was at Merrill Lynch, the CEO of our biggest customer flew in. Billion dollar net worth.

He showed up in jeans.
Grabbed his own coffee.
Asked our team about their kids.
Remembered names from his last visit.

When negotiations hit a snag, he said "Let me think about this over lunch."

Then asked where the good tacos were.

We went to a food truck. He paid. Cash. Left a big tip.

That's power without the performance.

Compare that to the executive with a special elevator code to avoid "regular" employees.

Those people? Nobody would take a bullet for them.

But the leader who makes you feel like you're talking to a friend who happens to run a company?

That's who people run through walls for.

Real authority doesn't need to announce itself.

It shows up in how you treat the intern.
How you handle being wrong.

The leaders worth following don't act like leaders.

They act like humans who happen to have more responsibility.

And that's exactly why people follow them.

Before any big decision, I force myself to write the opposition's case.

Why should we NOT hire this person?
Why is this strategy actually terrible?
Why would a smart person do the opposite?

The ability to argue both sides isn't intellectual masturbation.

It's the difference between confidence and delusion.

Most people with strong opinions can't explain why someone smart would disagree.

That's not conviction. That's ignorance with confidence.

Real strength is understanding exactly why you might be wrong.

And choosing your path anyway.

Nothing kills leadership credibility faster than a lack of consistency. 

Saying one thing Monday and doing the opposite Tuesday.

I once watched a CEO preach "work-life balance" at an all-hands.

Then email the team at 11pm asking for a deck by 7am.

Message received: Your words mean shit.

Here's what inconsistency really costs:

Your team stops listening to what you say.
They start watching what you do.
Then they copy it.

At Factor_, I learned this the hard way.

Told my team "family comes first." Then missed my daughter's first day at pre-school for a meeting that could've been rescheduled.

Someone on my team called me out: "So family comes first unless it's inconvenient?"

She was right.

That moment changed how I lead.

Your team doesn't need a perfect leader.

They need one they can predict.

Because credibility isn't built in grand gestures.

It's built in the thousand small moments when your actions match your words.

Even when no one's watching.

Especially then.

The most dangerous advice comes from people who've never lived your business.

The founder with a $500M exit. The investor who "pattern matched" our business to their winners. Industry expert who sold their company 10 years ago.

They all have opinions.

Strong ones.

At Factor_, we had an advisor who kept pushing us to copy Freshly's playbook. Made sense on paper. He'd seen it work.

But he saw quarterly reports. We lived daily reality.

Here's the thing about outside advice:

It's not wrong. It's just incomplete.

Those people don't understand your specific chaos.

But your team? They're in the trenches with you.

They know which fires are real and which are smoke.
They feel when something's off before it shows up in data.
They have context you can't explain in a board deck.

Take outside perspectives. Listen. Learn.

Then sit down with the people who actually run the business and ask: "What do you think?"

Their intuition beats any expert's opinion.

Because intuition isn't magic.

It's pattern recognition from living something every single day.

And nobody lives your business like your team.

The two simple things early stage companies really promote people for.

The first thing is problem-solving. 

Most people just complain about what's broken. They point fingers and blame other people. 

Start doing the opposite. When something is broken, fix it. 


Don't wait for permission or perfect instructions.

Just figure it out and make it work.

The second thing is execution. 

Ideas are worthless if you can't make them happen. Everyone has great ideas in meetings.

But most people never follow through. They get distracted or make excuses.

Become the person who always delivers. 
Meet deadlines. Keep promises. 

Find ways to get things done even when it seems impossible.

When you combine both, you become unstoppable.

You become the person everyone depends on.

And you get your flowers in the form of promotions.

Leaders don't promote people for being nice. 

They promote people who make their lives easier. 

People who solve problems and make things happen.

Taplio

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