Ryan Allis
Ryan Allis was the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of iContact from 2003 through its sale to Vocus for $169 million in February 2012. Allis is now the Chief Executive Officer of Connect in San Francisco and a member of the United Nations Foundation Global Entrepreneur Council.
In 2008, Allis wrote a book on entrepreneurship called Zero to One Million (McGraw-Hill, 2008).
Recognition
Allis has been recognized by INC Magazine as one of the Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30, by Ernst & Young as the Entrepreneur of the Year for the Carolinas, and by the United States Junior Chamber as one of the Ten Outstanding Young Americans (TOYA) of 2009. He was cited as one of the Top Ten Tech Power Players Under 30 by PeekScore.
In 2011, Allis gave the commencement speech at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Sciences, and gave a TEDx talk titled "Creating a Better World" focusing on five metrics of human ProgresS including life expectancy, infant mortality, per capita income, the % of humans living in extreme poverty, and carbon dioxide emissions.
Service
Allis is a member of the United Nations Foundation Global Entrepreneur Council which is made up of ten entrepreneurs who advise the United Nations Foundation. In May 2012, he visited the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya as part of a United Nations Foundation delegation. In June 2011, Allis joined a delegation from the United States Department Of State and the United States Agency for International Development to Cairo, Egypt to mentor Egyptian technology entrepreneurs and judge the U.S. State Department NexGen IT Boot Camp.
From 2008 until 2012 Allis was the Board Chairman of the international development non-profit organization Nourish International. Allis founded the HumanityFund, an impact investing fund investing in firms in Kenya, Uganda, and the United States.
Allis currently serves as a National Co-Chairperson for Technology for Obama along with Marc Benioff and Reid Hoffman and worked with the Obama 2012 Presidential Campaign.
Philanthropy
Following the sale of iContact, Allis and his co-founder Aaron Houghton established a $1.2 million iContact Foundation Scholarship Program for the children of past iContact employees. He has also contributed financially to the Council for Entrepreneurial Development in Durham, NC and to Nourish International. At iContact, Allis created the 4-1s Corporate Social Responsibility Program through which the company donated 1% of payroll, product, employee time, and company equity to 501(c)(3) programs, modeled after the Salesforce.com 1/1/1 philanthropic model.
Early Life & Education
Allis was born in 1984 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Andrew Allis and Pauline Middleton Allis. He attended school in Bradenton, Florida where he graduated from Manatee High School. While in high school in Florida, Allis built a web site design agency called Virante.
Allis studied economics as an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He graduated in the class of 2011 from the EO/MIT Entrepreneurial Masters Program and is now pursuing an MBA at Harvard Business School.