On the Record with Ryan Austin, CEO of Synapse
Hometown: Toronto
Hobbies: running, boating, hanging out with my family and my dog (teaching my newborn son, Levi, to grow up being fearless)
Three words to describe yourself: persistent, fearless, and a bit funny
Synapse is the world’s leading LearnOps platform that automates and streamlines your training development process so you can keep pace with business.
Q: What should we know about your childhood or where you grew up that may have shaped who you are today?
A: I was very fortunate in the sense that my parents sent me to a good school, and I got to travel a lot as a kid. On the other hand, I grew up in a somewhat poisonous household with my parents going through a nasty divorce. I have a brother 9 years younger than me, and at times I would hide him in the closet and cover his ears so he wouldn’t listen to my parents fighting. That sort of experience in childhood has a toll on people, but I learned how to leverage that experience into something positive and ensure that my household with my wife and son is healthy with a strong foundation. Business is one of the everyday motivators to continue to provide for my family even more. I am also very passionate about helping people, so it’s a way that can enable me to give back.
Q: Synapse isn’t your first company. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got where you are today professionally and how you’re applying what you’ve learned to Synapse?
A: I ended up leaving university in my 3rd year of school and founded my first company. That company was really interesting—it was similar to Shopify before Shopify existed—but since I was an inexperienced entrepreneur at the time, when things went wrong, I didn’t realize that it was normal and I gave up on the business way too early. At the time, I was young and eager to be successful right away. Knowing what I know today, I sometimes think back and feel that if I had known back then to be more patient, that business could have had an amazing outcome. This was a hard lesson to learn as it cost me years of opportunity costs, but it helped to shape me into being who I am today. I am still eager, but a lot more patient and I enjoy overcoming hard problems that would make most people run away.
Q: Are there any life lessons you live by?
A: Learning how to embrace uncertainty and be persistent. There have been so many times in my career, including in the early days of Synapse, when I thought the business wouldn’t make it. This one time (in our early days), I thought we wouldn’t have money to make payroll. I remember telling my wife and sitting on the floor almost in tears. Right at the exact time when I had thought we hit rock bottom, I got a phone call from an investor saying that he and his wife wanted to invest $100K and that they already wired the money. It’s stories like this that remind you to keep going - you never know what is around the corner. At the time I was worried, but if I could see into the future, I actually had nothing to worry about. These skills helped me build my last company, GoFish Cam, which my brother and I exited in 2019.
Q: Getting into Synapse specifically, can you tell us how/why/when it was founded?
A: In 2012, I took a sales role for a company called World Trader Group and within 3 years became the SVP of Training for the Americas. That’s where I fell in love with Learning & Development (L&D). After WTG was sold to a private equity firm in 2015, I started an L&D consulting firm where I partnered with corporations to help them think through various operating systems. During my consulting, I started to see the problems that Synapse solves, and I realized that the industry needed a purpose-built platform to help L&D teams optimize performance and demonstrate the impact of learning investments better. Synapse was born from this thesis and we brought a full product to market in 2018.
Q: You’re Canadian and currently live in Toronto where Synapse is based, but at one point Synapse was based in the US. Can you tell us that story?
A: Synapse has taken me and my family to many places - it’s been a journey. From Toronto, I moved to New York to work with an EdTech Accelerator that helped me learn how to take problem statements from my consulting customers and build a software product. We are the first LearnOps platform in the market so there has been a lot of learnings during the product development process. When in New York, Synapse received some media coverage and ExxonMobil approached us to learn more. I flew to Texas to share our product plans (we were still pre-product) and ended up staying in Houston to work with ExxonMobil’s team throughout the initial Alpha and Beta stages of Synapse. At this point, we raised a pre-seed financing round and decided to move the company to Austin, Texas. We loved it there, but eventually the market was saying to either bring the company back to New York or Toronto to build the right go-to-market team. I moved the company back to Toronto in late 2018, and in early 2019, we raised a seed investment round.
Q: How has the Synapse product changed from the beginning to now?
A: In early 2019 we raised a seed round and built our go-to-market team. We grew from having 5 customers to over 100. In our early days, we were a one-product feature, but over time built out more features and became an end-to-end platform for managing learning operations. The seed financing helped us invest in the product to continue to execute on market feedback and towards our vision. Now, the team is focussed on scaling Synapse and securing category leadership. We’re at a point where we can really step on the gas and focus on growth. It’s been an amazing journey.
Q: Speaking of Synapse’s future, what are you most proud of today and what are you most excited about in terms of where Synapse is headed?
A: I’m really proud of the team. We’ve basically created a new category in SaaS because learning operations previously didn’t exist. Operation software and systems exist in other departments - think Jira for engineering teams or HubSpot for marketing teams - but when it comes to L&D teams (and over 180,000 of them exist today), they have no purpose-built operating system to manage work. The L&D industry has other downstream systems for delivering and tracking training such as LMS or LXP platforms, but upstream where L&D teams actually collaborate and plan projects, there is currently a gap. Up until now, L&D teams have been using disparate tools, and there hasn’t been a way to get automated insights behind their work to optimize performance and their L&D investments. We’re bringing these best practices to L&D teams, and for the first time, they can run L&D operations like a business. As a result, they can focus on less administrative tasks and free up time to focus on more strategic learning initiatives that can help their respective organizations grow.
Q: Do you have a specific leadership style or certain principles by which you run your business?
A: I would say my leadership style is collaborative. I don’t call people employees at Synapse—they’re my partners. We try to give everyone stock and educate them on options when needed. I spend 1:1 time with each person who joins the company to make sure they understand the value of stock options and how we can create value together.
I’m also very empathetic. Life is hard in general, but with COVID and remote working for example, anxiety levels have increased with people and in some cases depression. Talking about it, normalizing this, and doing health checks with the team is extremely important to me. That’s why we implemented a concept called “You Days”. A “You Day” is a forced day off—no meetings, no pressure—because when everyone does take time off together, no one is thinking about missing a meeting or having to reply to an email. You just shut down the company for a day and then people come back feeling completely refreshed—it’s awesome!
Lastly, I also believe in being data driven - numbers matter! My goal with Synapse is to get the business to a place where we can take data from every department and tie it back to financial models for predictability. After the next fundraising round we want to grow 10x, so we’re introducing updated operating models. My vision is for specific people in the company to own specific unit economics or business metrics. If we have specific owners of these data points, the business will become easier to manage and run experiments so we can invest in the areas that could help us scale while minimizing risks. It also motivates people, because our people can see the impact of their work across the business.
Q: It must be difficult to prioritize hiring for marketing vs. engineering vs. business development, for example. How have you handled prioritizing growth when building a business?
A: As a founder you want to try to build the whole business as fast as possible so at the very beginning we tried to turn on everything (sales and product) at once. We tried to accelerate our sales motion while we were still in the beta phase of the product selling vision. In hindsight, this was probably the most productive way to grow Synapse. If we had simply focused all our time and energy on product development, we would have gotten further ahead faster. Then, if we turned on the sales motion at this stage, we would have seen a much stronger growth curve faster. I’ve seen friends who are entrepreneurs 2 or 3 times over, and they don’t turn on the sales motion until the product is somewhat more mature and then grow 700% within a year. There are lessons to learn from this strategy.
Another rule that I follow is a concept that I call: “the baby needs what the baby needs”. If you are a parent to a child and that child is crying because it is hungry, as the parent, you’ll do whatever is in your power to find a way to feed your child. In business, there are times when it too may start crying because it needs something. As a CEO, your job is to keep the business healthy and happy. You have to find resources and make them available where they may not exist. You need to feed your baby so it can grow to its fullest potential.
Lastly, prioritization and focus is a very important skill.
Q: What do you think are the biggest opportunities in the L&D space?
A: Personally, I think that Synapse has a massive opportunity because right now everybody is talking about L&D solutions —upskilling, content, etc. This means that L&D teams need to plan, prioritize, and budget priorities in an even bigger and faster way - and they can’t keep up with internal demand using manual processes or disparate tools. Synapse solves this problem and allows the L&D teams to operate at new levels of efficiency and get the insights they need in real-time to make better decisions. We saw the market opportunity years ago and with certain tailwinds caused by COVID, the investments we’ve made to mature the platform are starting to allow us to win over this new market.
Q: Are there any books/podcasts/publications you recommend your team to read/follow?
A: Absolutely. I always tell the sales team to read “Tell To Win” by Peter Guber. It’s about how to tell stories effectively. I also recommend “Shoe Dog” by Phil Knight. It reminds you how hard business is and how to embrace uncertainty - the journey of growing big business is not easy.
Q: Who has been your biggest inspiration/mentor/motivator as an entrepreneur?
A: I’ve had a few. Of course there are well known entrepreneurs like Elon Musk who inspire me, but my biggest shoutout goes to early business mentors: Wayne McCracken, David Burstein, and Victor Koosh. Wayne taught me about corporate law, David taught me about corporate finance and rules of engagement, and Victor taught me how to embrace uncertainty and balance (I am still learning how to balance better).
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Ryan Austin is a serial entrepreneur who has spent over 10 years driving improvements in learning and development. In his current role as Founder & CEO at Synapse, Ryan is focused on developing innovative products to help learning teams increase productivity and automate operational processes to create impactful training at scale. Prior to Synapse, Ryan served as Senior Vice President for World Trade Group, an organization that offers live events, online products, and training courses. He also co-founded GoFish Cam, an underwater camera that sits on your fishing line, which exited in 2019. Ryan studied Sociology at York University; Business/Corporate Communications at Western University; and various entrepreneurship courses through DMZ, Surge Accelerator, StartEd Accelerator, Telluride Venture Accelerator, Capital Factory and The Next Founders Program.
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