AR

Aaron Rankin

Co-founder at Sprout Social | Investor

Greater Chicago Area

Invests in

  • Min Investment:

    $100,000.00
  • Max Investment:

    $5,000,000.00
  • Target Investment:

    $1,500,000.00

Work Experience

  • Co-Founder & Board Member

    2009

    (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 & Principal

    2020

    A small family office focused on: - Direct investing in companies addressing decarbonization, the energy transition, sustainability, and climate change mitigation. Existing investment areas include hydrogen infrastructure, water, space, food tech, construction, and CDR. - Direct investing in software startups. Since 2020 we’ve supported over 40 companies spanning B2B SaaS, software infrastructure, health & wellness, and other discretionary themes. - LP in thematically related funds. - Philanthropically supporting environmental, climate, education, and health causes.

2006 - 2010

  • Software Engineer, Special Operations

    2006 - 2010

    I worked for Endeca, which was acquired by Oracle for $1.1B in 2011. Endeca was a pioneer in search and information retrieval. Predominantly worked on the CEO's special projects team, pioneering productizations of our technology, helping the company prove ROI to penetrate new segments. My teams and I worked in a forward-deployed manner, working with customers to prototype and develop 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.

2004 - 2006

  • 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.

2003 - 2003

  • 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.

1999 - 2000

  • IT & Web Programming

    1999 - 2000

    I was fortunate to be on the ground for the dot-com era through a high-school internship. I worked on a Visual Basic “ASP” web application, I built and maintained Windows NT/2000 & Linux servers, and & did desktop computing support for a rapidly growing startup.