Ryan Sit

Current

Vice President of Special Projects at Tsavo
CEO at PicClick LLC
Owner at Freestyle Labs

Advisor & Equity Owner (Prior Founder/CTO) at DropShots Inc.

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Past

Senior Software Engineer/Product Manager at Novatel Wireless
Graduate Researcher at UCSD
Software Engineer at Azur Inc.

Undergraduate Research Assistant at UCSD
Undergraduate Research Assistant at UCSD
Programmer, System Administrator at UCSD Academic Computing Services
Pre-professional Programmer at IBM Almaden Research Center
Multimedia Curriculum Producer, Production Artist & Graphic Designer at NASA Ames Research Center: The STELLAR Multimedia Curriculum

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Education

University of California, San Diego
University of California, San Diego

Recommended

1 person has recommended Ryan

Connections

196 connections

Industry

Internet

Websites

Ryan Sit’s Summary

Successful parallel Internet entrepreneur with over 12 years experience in the Internet space. Hands-on experience creating companies from inception to acquisition. Extremely large breadth and depth of skills in Internet business. Focused mostly on quick startups, bootstrapping, and cash flow businesses.

Ryan Sit’s Specialties:

Software Development, Software Architecture, Project Planning, Internet Technologies, User Interface, Consumer Technologies, Business Development, New Product Development, Management, SEO, Online Business Models (subscription, advertising, affiliate, ecommerce), Online Marketing, Research, Graphic Design, Web Server Architecture, Web 2.0, PHP, MySQL, XHTML, CSS, AJAX, Javascript, C++, JAVA

Ryan Sit’s Experience

Vice President of Special Projects

Tsavo

(Internet industry)

October 2008 — Present (1 year 2 months)

Worked on top products at Tsavo, mostly involving aggregation and search. First project become the #1 most profitable website out of hundreds of Tsavo owned websites in a matter of months. Deeply involved with Product Development, Engineering, and Optimization. Worked closely with CEO, Michael Jones, on experimental projects. Publicly released products include:
http://daymix.com/
http://twithority.com/
CEO

PicClick LLC

(Privately Held; Internet industry)

August 2008 — Present (1 year 4 months)

Visual eBay browser derived from my visual browsing design and aggregation techniques from Listpic. Bootstrapped from 0 traffic, 0 funding, and 0 revenue to generating over $1 million in gross sales per month for eBay after 1 year from launch. Top 50 eBay affiliate. 0 full-time employees.
Owner

Freestyle Labs

(Privately Held; Marketing and Advertising industry)

September 2006 — Present (3 years 3 months)

Lab for business research and experimentation. Developed several successful and highly profitable products. Products have been featured multiple times on major news sources including Techcrunch, Lifehacker, CNET, Digg front page, Ars Technica, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, Wired Magazine, Business 2.0, PC World, PC Magazine, ZDNet, Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, USA Today, G4 TV and Revision3 TV. Top products include:

Favtape, the easiest way to play music online.

Listpic, a visual classifieds browser. Developed an innovative visual browsing interface. Grew Listpic.com from 0 visitors to 43,000 visitors a day in 9 months. Improved SEO from 4% to 89% organic referrals. Optimized Adsense revenue from $4 eCPM to $24 eCPM. Added affiliate and contextual in-text advertising that increased revenue 12x. Prior top 50 eBay affiliate.

SEND6, a private label file transfer service, was acquired by TouchStone Capital Group, Inc. in November 2007.

More at http://www.freestylelabs.com/
Advisor & Equity Owner (Prior Founder/CTO)

DropShots Inc.

(Internet industry)

September 2005 — Present (4 years 3 months)

Developed DropShots photo and video sharing web application from idea to active implementation. Pioneered innovative features such as video transcoding to Flash, conversation system, and automatic organization. Created working business model of premium subscriptions that brought company to profitability. Implemented marketing plan that drove growth to from 10% per month to 40% per week. Secured private equity investment after meeting with major VCs in Silicon Valley. After funding, further grew the customer base 60x. Increased conversion rate from 0.5% to 3%. Developed new revenue streams including advertising, print product sales, and platform licensing. Lead development of full redesign. Company continues to grow and maintain profitability. DropShots has been featured in major news source including The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fox News TV, The Globe and Mail, and InformationWeek.
Senior Software Engineer/Product Manager

Novatel Wireless

(Public Company; 201-500 employees; NVTL; Telecommunications industry)

March 2001 — September 2005 (4 years 7 months)

Manager for core software product, Mobilink. Lead software team to re-architect and develop the Mobilink 2.0 product. Responsible for program management for software host applications. Worked directly with customers and sales team on requirements and qualification. Hired and grew software team. Participated in product research and new product development. Prior to the Mobilink product, lead development of NDIS connectionless driver product from concept to release. Mobilink 2.0 and NDIS driver products were crucial in securing business with major partners included Verizon Wireless, AT&T Wireless, Dell and more. The Mobilink and NDIS products continue to be developed and shipped today, and has been rolled out to millions of customers through almost all major wireless carriers and laptop manufacturers.
Graduate Researcher

UCSD

(Educational Institution; 10,001 or more employees; Research industry)

April 2001 — September 2001 (6 months)

Project lead and inventor of the Swurl.com search engine. This project was a practice of software engineering principles. The project team developed an entirely unique search engine made specifically for searching URLs. A Microsoft Internet Explorer plug-in was also developed. In combination with our search engine, the plug-in eliminated page-not-found errors and instead made suggestions on possible correct URLs. This feature was later implemented by Microsoft.
Software Engineer

Azur Inc.

(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)

January 2001 — March 2001 (3 months)

Developed three major components for Azur's main product, eClips. Implemented a manageable and searchable help system. Also created a VoiceXML front-end and WML front-end for eClips.
Undergraduate Research Assistant

UCSD

(Educational Institution; 10,001 or more employees; Research industry)

January 2000 — January 2001 (1 year 1 month)

Designed front-end interaction and added functionality to experimental search engine using adaptive information retrieval for molecular biology. The query results are parsed and processed using perl and python, and displayed using a combination of Java Applets, Swing, and dynamic HTML. Attended research seminars on Artificial Intelligence and Information Retrieval.
Undergraduate Research Assistant

UCSD

(Educational Institution; 10,001 or more employees; Research industry)

April 1999 — January 2000 (10 months)

Developed C/C++ tools that were structured around RT Level Test Analysis methodologies. This included extraction of data from Verilog files and the implementation and analysis of various data structures. Attended research seminars on Reliability and Testability Analysis.
Programmer, System Administrator

UCSD Academic Computing Services

(Educational Institution; 51-200 employees; Research industry)

October 1997 — March 1999 (1 year 6 months)

Was the sole developer of http://acs-plan.ucsd.edu/, an interactive web site that replaced paper forms. Functionality included password protection and saving for future editing. Created using Filemaker Pro, Lasso, JavaScript, and CSS. Redesigned organization's home page. Administered over 100 computers.
Pre-professional Programmer

IBM Almaden Research Center

(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; IBM; Computer Software industry)

June 1997 — September 1997 (4 months)

Designed professional web pages for various IBM products and groups. Experimented with and applied cutting-edge internet technologies of the time including Java Applets, JavaScript, CSS, dynamic HTML, DOM, XML, and VRML. Programmed 3D model of IBM facility using VRML. Created original graphics for various IBM applications.
Multimedia Curriculum Producer, Production Artist & Graphic Designer

NASA Ames Research Center: The STELLAR Multimedia Curriculum

(Government Agency; 10,001 or more employees; Research industry)

June 1996 — August 1996 (3 months)

Produced original art for interactive multimedia lesson CD-ROM and web page. Helped design and create graphical user interface. Developed web page for project.

Ryan Sit’s Education

University of California, San Diego

Master of Science , Computer Science , 2001 — 2004

Technical concentration in Communication Networks and Software Engineering. Published paper in the area of Computer-Human Interaction:
http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/HICSS.2005.203
University of California, San Diego

Bachelor of Science , Computer Science , 1996 — 2001

UCSD Provost's Honors