Ry Walker started his career building one of the first web agencies in the '90s, sold it right before the dot-com bubble burst, and led technology teams at multiple companies afterward. In 2015, he co-founded Astronomer, scaled it to a unicorn, and then started all over again, raising $20M to found Tembo.

Ry talks with Warner Moore about why he sees life as an open world RPG, the night he was on the phone with an investor asking how to shut Astronomer down before a different call saved the company instead, and why he calls venture capital "liquid bravery." The conversation also covers where AI is headed: why Ry thinks the real transformation is a 10-year story, his case for private, self-hosted AI, how Tembo's cloud coding agents work, and the risk of centralizing an organization's knowledge into a single AI memory system.

The conversation covers entrepreneurship, risk-taking, venture capital, AI adoption timelines, private AI, and lessons from three decades of building companies.

🔗 Connect:

Ry Walker: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rywalker/

Tembo: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tembo-inc/

Warner Moore:⁠ https://www.linkedin.com/in/warnermoore/⁠

Gamma Force: https://gammaforce.io

📚 Mentioned in the episode:

➡️ The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek

➡️ Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse

➡️ The Molecule of More by Daniel Z. Lieberman

➡️ The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz