Aaron Rankin
Founder of Sprout Social
Aaron Rankin
Founder of Sprout Social
Greater Chicago Area
Overview
Work Experience
Co-Founder & Board Member
2009 - Current
(NASDAQ: SPT) Our software helps 30,000+ companies around the world manage their social media channels more efficiently and create stronger relationships with their customers. From local businesses to global charities, our products make a difference every second of every day. Our team is relentless about solving hard problems and is wholly committed to the success of our customers.
Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder
2010 - 2023
From inception, I worked to build our technology, grow our product teams, develop our business, product, and technical strategies, and shape a culture of excellent products and customer success.
Investor
2020
As a family office, we invest early-stage capital in techno-industrials and deep tech, particularly around decarbonization, the energy transition, and climate. We also support related work in research, policy, conservation and other non-profit pursuits through Rankin Foundation. Prior to this focus we invested in over 40 companies spanning B2B SaaS, software infrastructure, health & wellness, and other themes.
Software Engineer, Special Operations
2006 - 2010
Note: I worked for Endeca, which was acquired by Oracle after my departure. Endeca was a pioneer in search and information retrieval. CEO's special projects team, pioneering productizations of our technology, helping the company prove ROI to penetrate new segments. My teams and I prototyped and developed many novel, high-scale applications on Endeca, which addressed specific business inefficiencies such as high-volume global staffing, auto warranty claims, and optimal part selection for manufacturing design. Our work helped incubate Endeca's Business Intelligence product line, which became Oracle BI.
IT Strategy
2004 - 2006
My team was responsible IT security policy, risk and architecture for the internal IBM business, a group reporting up into the IBM CIO. I had direct business responsibility for the workstation security of 300,000+ IBM colleagues.
Extreme Blue intern
2003 - 2003
Premier industry internship. My team (3 devs, 1 MBA) worked on behalf of IBM Tivoli on a novel system to classifying Intrusion Detection System alarms.
IT & Web Programming
1999 - 2000
High school job with a dot-com era software company. I worked on their VB-based ASP web application, built and maintained Windows/Linux servers, and did desktop computing support.
Education
Investments
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