Timothy D. Ryan (BS ’78) endows an entrepreneurship prize with a bequest that will help catalyze undergraduate innovators.
As an undergraduate in the late 1970s, Tim D. Ryan already was harnessing his natural entrepreneurial spirit to launch the first of many businesses. He and two roommates spent nights in the campus machine shop crafting the protype of what would become the Con Brio Advanced Digital Synthesizer and the focus of his first company. At the time, not many other Caltech undergrads were thinking about growing a business.
“When I was on campus, it was 1 percent entrepreneurial thinking,” says Ryan. “Ten years from now, I’d like to see that more as 10 or 20 percent of how undergraduates view their work.”
To help undergraduates complement their innovative thinking with business skills, he has committed to endow the Timothy Ryan Entrepreneur Prize as part of his estate. The prize supports the Timothy D. Ryan Summer Entrepreneurship Program, a 10-week summer internship that helps students translate their creative ideas into novel commercial products and potential startups. Projects have included leveraging AI for video translation and exploring neural circuits to help regulate sodium levels in humans, among others.
“I was able to start my first company because of Caltech’s generosity and its open-door policy where students like me could pursue our ideas,” he says. “This entrepreneur prize is a way for me to pay it forward, enabling undergraduates to get through the initial startup phase.”
Revolutionizing Sound
Alan Danziger in the Caltech Hearing Lab.
Ryan started out as a physics major but soon found himself intrigued by the microprocessor chip that had just been released commercially. At the time, Ryan’s roommate, Don Lieberman (BS ’77), was working with the founder of the Caltech Hearing Lab, George Zweig, on a stand-alone synthesis system to generate specifically designed sounds for mapping hearing in the cat brain. Another roommate, Alan Danziger (BS ’77), joined Ryan and Lieberman on a visit to the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), where sounds from acoustic instruments were being analyzed, studied, and resynthesized.
These experiences inspired the Caltech roommates. “Let’s abandon this old analog approach,” Ryan recalls of their discussion. “We’ve got microprocessors. We’ve got digital electronics. Maybe we can digitally synthesize all of it. And that’s what we did.”
They founded their company, named Con Brio, and funded a prototype with the help of real estate developer and philanthropist Samuel Oschin—a connection made through Caltech staff. Their efforts produced a device that could accurately resynthesize analyzed acoustic instrument sounds using the SAIL algorithms and resulted in introducing new ways to synthesize sounds for electronic keyboards for the music industry.
Ryan would go on to found additional companies, including Midiman, later known as M-Audio. This innovation provided interfaces to record and stream audio on a computer. In essence, it removed the need to have a stand-alone synthesizer like the Con Brio. In 2004, Avid Technology acquired M-Audio, and Ryan retired in 2006. He now shares generously of his time by counseling undergraduates participating in the summer internship program.
A Legacy that Looks to the Future
The percentage of Caltech undergraduates pursuing full-time jobs in industry is now at 44 percent, slightly more than the 43 percent who attend graduate or professional school, according to Caltech’s Career Achievement, Leadership, and Exploration (CALE). Resources like the Entrepreneurship Prize will allow more students to gain valuable experience earlier in their careers, says Ryan.
“I wanted to address the undergraduates,” he says, “because they’re often the ones that come up with these brilliant ideas to use technology in new and innovative ways.” As he reflects on his late nights on campus building the Con Brio prototype, Ryan envisions opportunities to provide more students with additional resources to help power their dreams.
“Caltech students are always making stuff—whether in their dorm rooms or the labs,” he says. The serial entrepreneur would like to see more spaces and equipment made available to students to help turn
their concepts into actual prototypes.
Pulling from his own campus experience, Ryan hopes to enable others to achieve what he was able to achieve—and more—with the right support in place.
“Caltech is near the top of the list of things that were very formative and important to me,” he says. “I hope I can open the door for students to build businesses from their nascent ideas.”