SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Woah! Unicorn Founder Quits Unicorn During $213M Raise, Launches Something Bigger
08 Aug 2025
Chapter 1: Who is Ry Walker and what is his entrepreneurial background?
Our interview today is with this founder of Astronomer. Yes, the code play Astronomer. It's Ry Walker. Now, Ry launched Astronomer in 2015 and walked away in 2022 during their $213 million Series C when the business was doing tens of millions of revenue. And his new company he launched is really special.
In the next 20 minutes, he's going to show you exactly how this serial entrepreneur went from zero to product market fit in 60 days, why he believes that AI agents will 10X his revenue in the software development market overall, and lastly, how he's going to land a million dollar per year Fortune 50 customers.
Plus, he'll show you why merged pull requests are his North Star metric and the creative way he's actually getting marketers, not engineers, to virally spread his product. Let's jump in. Hey, folks. My guest today is Ry Walker.
Chapter 2: Why did Ry Walker leave Astronomer during their Series C funding?
He is a Cincinnati-based entrepreneur and software engineer. He's the founder and CEO of Tembo.io. It's an AI developer teammate we're going to talk about here in a second. Before that, though, he co-founded Astronomer, obviously, in the news today. We'll talk about that as well, and Differential. He's recognized for his leadership in tech. Ry is also an active investor.
Ry, you ready to take us to the top? I sure am. All right. This was so funny when I was preparing for this interview. I was trying to share my screen and show you this. I'm going, man, right, right, right. Because your team reached out to me. I said, how do I know this guy? And I remember you were one of the OGs on the podcast back in the day. This was literally eight years ago.
I think you had just hit 60K of MRR at Astronomer.
Yeah. The early days. And that was probably a lie back then, too. I don't know if I told you the truth, but I'm sure you get that. I get that a lot.
Right. Yeah. I think you just raised two million bucks.
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Chapter 3: How did Ry achieve product-market fit for Tembo in just 60 days?
But anyways, we have to obviously talk about it, like at least quickly before going to Tembo. Astronomers obviously in the news right now. Famous Coldplay concert. What's your involvement now there as a founder?
Well, I left the company and left the board in 2022. So, yeah, not not super involved. However, you know, I have some great friends. People I hired are still there, especially a couple of a group of college kids. Their first job was at Astronomer and they're still there from a program called DFA Venture for America out of New York originally. Yeah, so I have some friends.
Chapter 4: What role do merged pull requests play in Tembo's strategy?
Obviously, I've talked to him a bunch during the, which I called a Coldplaygate situation. And it was a pretty, pretty crazy time.
Chapter 5: How does Tembo enable non-technical teams to contribute to software development?
I tried to, you know, siphon a little bit of attention over to Tembo during that as well to some success. But yeah, it was a...
People don't give you enough credit. They see you and they go, Oh, he's an engineering founder, but you've got a marketing gene too. Yeah. You know, siphoning off attention, right?
Yeah. You gotta do something. Um, but I also wanted to support them too. You know, I think companies, uh, been going for a long time. I still have some equity there too. So that's, you know, again, I'm not, I do have, uh, You know, a horse in the game there. But, you know.
Yes. And what prompts? I mean, we do have a lot of second time, third time founders that listen to this show. And so I'm always curious, you know, what prompts someone like you? I mean, everything we know public about a genre. I mean, when you left in 2022, this thing is it's doing great. You know, it's in the dev tech space. You know, it's grown like a weed. Why decide to sort of leave?
Were you maybe just bored or something else? Can you share your story and transition to Tembo?
Yeah, I mean, I tell a lot of people this, especially in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, I was offered a chance to sell my shares in secondary at our Series B, Series C rounds. This was the Zerp era, and I said yes. Basically, the way I saw it was, I'm a founder sitting at a poker table with a big giant pile of chips, and I have no money in my bank account.
And someone says, would you like to leave the table? It's like, yeah, let's make this happen. equity real. Uh, so I had a rare chance of making that happen without, without the company being acquired. Um, you know, we just had a lot of interest in our, in our rounds and, you know, I'd been doing that, that company since 2015. So, you know, seven years in, um, I also had hired a CEO.
You know, we hired a CTO. We hired a bunch of leadership. And so, you know, I just wasn't I'm an early stage person. I'm a from zero to blank person. You know, not not what they're doing now.
It's not my not my talent. He's very good at keeping the revenue in words private. He goes, zero to blank, not what they're doing now. I can't get anything out of it. It's a good story, right? Because a lot of founders, they don't think about it like a poker table, but it is. I mean, you, for whatever reason, you knew, you've been around the block before, you knew 2021 was crazy, right?
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