Ricky Yean

I’m a 3x startup founder and occasional writer about technology startups and Asian America. I’m a Stanford, Y Combinator and StartX alum. Currently I’m building Flow Club, a virtual co-working service designed to help you fly through your tasks and feel great about your work. Learn more about me or Follow @rickyyean .

Popular Essays:

Privilege and inequality in Silicon Valley (140k views on Medium, syndicated to Vox, Quartz,Business Insider, SF Chronicle, Observer, #1 on Hacker News, translated to Chinese)
Asian-Americans are Cultural Orphans (aka I hope Crazy Rich Asians isn’t a flop) (18k views on Medium, syndicated to NextShark and mentioned by The New Yorker, KQED and the Associated Press)
A San Franciscan tries the future of mobility (10.7k views on Medium)
What startups get wrong about public relations (3k views on MarTech Series)
The “Full-Stack Startup” and Jiro’s Dreams of Sushi (1.5k views on Medium)
What Steve Jobs meant to me (1k views, syndicated on Stanford Daily and mentioned by USA Today)

Latest Essays: (I’m too busy to write “blog posts” these days, but I write a personal newsletter for fun for friends and anyone who cares to know me at that level)

Startups:

Crowdbooster (2010-2016): Crowdbooster was a venture-backed SaaS startup I started with David Tran and Mark Linsey. We created one of the most popular Twitter and Facebook analytics tools and popularized the idea of Social Media Optimization (SMO). We ended up discontinuing the service despite the product being used by over 2,000 of the world’s biggest brands and agencies and making $1M in ARR because we wanted to build something that with an even larger scale of impact. Below are some Tweets to reminisce about the wonderful experience we had.

super impressed with @crowdbooster's social analytics. the founders rarely sleep. http://t.co/E2WK54S (thanks @dtran320)
— Cole Rise (@colerise) July 12, 2011

Really liking @Crowdbooster so far. Simple yet informative
— Emily Chang (@emilychangtv) September 5, 2011

Watching @dickc's session at #w2s. Great shoutouts for @socialflow, @dataminr, @crowdbooster, @cotweet, @radian6 http://t.co/labjYZN5
— Ryan Sarver (@rsarver) October 20, 2011

Another reason to use the free @Crowdbooster service: this useful weekly email. #coolnewtools pic.twitter.com/Ev6iux8Z
— Sree Sreenivasan (Threads: @sreenet) (@sree) December 22, 2011

Congrats to our friends @rickyyean and @Crowdbooster on endless great press – "Best Free Social Media Monitoring Tool" http://t.co/0NhwMll
— Eric Garland (@garland) July 15, 2011

https://twitter.com/mkfnch/status/209694685562802177

The longer I use @crowdbooster the more I love it! Simple, useful, efficient.
— Mike Schwede (@mikeschwede) May 15, 2012

https://twitter.com/APACloud/status/266789310513168384

.@crowdbooster makes me a better tweeter by creating a feedback loop. And helps generate new blog ideas. Thanks @dtran320 @rickyyean
— andrew chen (@andrewchen) March 28, 2013

Oh this is cool. Just found out @Crowdbooster is mentioned in a books. Dead trees! http://t.co/fzww9u3K4C pic.twitter.com/VLCObYOAus
— Ricky Yean (@rickyyean) June 22, 2015

Upbeat (2016-2018)

Upbeat was first known as “PRX.” Our goal was to create build a full-stack, software-enabled public relations agency. It was a very different challenged compared to Crowdbooster which was a SaaS tool. This didn’t end up working out, but we still helped a lot of people and learned a lot. I’ll write more about this soon…

Flow Club (2021-present)

Media Appearances and Talks

Will fill this in.