Rob Ryan from tech pioneer to entrepreneurship guru.

• Author: Stewart, Heather

Dob Ryan says the type of entrepreneurs he is willing to take under his wing have "grit--real, raw grit. They know how to get in the trenches. They know how to build something; they know how to get out and sell it."

He could be describing himself.

Throughout his career--from his early boyhood school days to his life as a computer networking engineer to his time as an intrepid entrepreneur--Ryan's grit and determination enabled him to barrel through challenges and accomplish tremendous goals.

Young and Ambitious

Ryan now lives on a beautiful ranch set within the Rocky Mountains of Montana. But his beginnings were much more humble. His father was a milkman and his mother was an office manager. They worked hard so that Ryan could have an excellent education.

And Ryan applied himself. As a young boy, he attended a Catholic school run by nuns, and he says hard work was not an option. "At an early age I realized that I could learn. Yes, it's hard, but my brain was capable of learning, and I began to have some success with math," he says.

His academic success earned him a spot at Cornell University, where he double majored in math and physics. He took his studies very seriously.

"I just kept pushing myself, because I figured my Dad is working three jobs, and I'll be darned if I'm not going to push myself while I'm up here and try to do the best that I can and try to get the most out of a great school," Ryan says. "What it gave me is incredible work habits, and it allowed me to understand that when I focus, even on very hard subjects, I would have some success at them. That was a really good thing to know."

After Cornell, Ryan embarked on a career in computer networking--which eventually put him at the forefront of the emerging internet. In the '70s, he was a systems analyst at Lawrence Livermore Lab, where he worked on the first nonmilitary extension of Arpanet, the foundation of the modern internet. Later, as a senior engineer at Intel, he authored that company's portion of the Ethernet specification, helping to set the standard for local area networking.

Risk and Reward

Working at Intel led to a real turning point for Ryan, however. He had earned the company's top engineering award for his work on the Ethernet, and he decided to approach then-President Andrew Grove with a request.

"I said, 'I'd like some stock in the company.' Now, this took a lot of courage--if you had ever seen Andy Grove and his demeanor. And he said, 'We don't give stock to...