Co-Founder & CEO @pennant_ai (YC S26). Building AI-native solutions for public markets. @PalantirTech Startup Fellowship. Created @govarena.
San Francisco, CA
Joined October 2011
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Our team at @pennant_ai is building the Corporate Governance OS for the next age of public markets. We're proud and incredibly excited to be launching with @ycombinator today.
We know this market and the pain points we are solving for firsthand, and we are thrilled to be defining a new way forward.
Lots of hard work to get here and plenty more ahead, grateful to be on this journey with @0xtotaylor!
If you touch proxy voting, shareholder activism or corporate governance, and want to shake things up, let's talk.
getpennant.ai
Ryan Nowicki Stewart retweeted
Knowing your customer’s job is a starting point. Not a reason to stop asking questions.
Know the role. Stay curious about the reality.
Would your former boss use the product you’re building?
Every day. On the job. Not just as a favor.
That’s the standard @rywicks and his co-founder @0xtotaylor set for @pennant_ai
Huge congrats to the @pennant_ai team on their $5M seed round!! 🚀
Ryan Nowicki Stewart retweeted
Don't just build what you think customers need. Get close enough to their work that you know what earns a place in their daily routine.
Would your former boss use the product you’re building?
Every day. On the job. Not just as a favor.
That’s the standard @rywicks and his co-founder @0xtotaylor set for @pennant_ai
Huge congrats to the @pennant_ai team on their $5M seed round!! 🚀
Ryan Nowicki Stewart retweeted
Would your former boss use the product you’re building?
Every day. On the job. Not just as a favor.
That’s the standard @rywicks and his co-founder @0xtotaylor set for @pennant_ai
Huge congrats to the @pennant_ai team on their $5M seed round!! 🚀
BREAKING 🚨 @pennant_ai, co-founded by @rywicks (CEO) and @0xtotaylor (CTO), raised a $5M seed round led by Urban Innovation Fund with participation from @ycombinator and a group of strategic angel investors, to build the world model for corporate governance, starting with proxy voting.
hubs.ly/Q04BR2KF0
Thank you @Fondocom and @thestartpod, grateful to be our investors, partners and our clients on this journey with us!
BREAKING 🚨 @pennant_ai, co-founded by @rywicks (CEO) and @0xtotaylor (CTO), raised a $5M seed round led by Urban Innovation Fund with participation from @ycombinator and a group of strategic angel investors, to build the world model for corporate governance, starting with proxy voting.
hubs.ly/Q04BR2KF0
Let's go! Thank you to our investors, partners and clients on this journey with us, just getting started.
We’re proud to announce Pennant’s $5M seed round.
Thank you to our lead investor, Urban Innovation Fund, to @ycombinator, and to our many valued industry investors, partners and clients who are on this journey with us.
We’re hiring in New York City. If you want to build frontier AI with @0xtotaylor, @rywicks and the team at the cutting edge of corporate governance, helping investors and companies navigate decisions that shape trillions of dollars in public markets, we’d love to hear from you.
getpennant.ai/insights/seed-…
Fresh off of our summer with @ycombinator, we're based back in NYC, we're hitting escape velocity and we're hiring at @pennant_ai! If you're ready to be part of a founding team that's empowering investors and public companies to make their biggest decisions that move markets, we want to hear from you. You'll know your power users on a first name basis, and build IRL on a team where everyone is expected to execute like an FDE. And don't worry, no wall street hype video required... Although, we're based down the street from @NYSE , so we're not ruling out a sequel. Apply at the links below.
Huge shout out to Jen and the team from the Spectacle Shoppe in @VisitOrlando who will probably never see this but came in super clutch for a guy that did not pack enough contact lens for this conference!
Ryan Nowicki Stewart retweeted
Pennant isn’t guessing what institutional investors need
@rywicks is building alongside them
Start with the highest-friction workflow
Solve it deeply
Watch the same pain repeat across customers
That’s not random bespoke work
That’s customer-driven product discovery
@rywicks, CEO & Cofounder, @pennant_ai on @Fondocom @thestartpod
Learn more: fondo.ai/4xUVCoQ
Ryan Nowicki Stewart retweeted
we love a good founder crossover @rywicks
No better way to move back to NYC than spending the day at @cornell_tech! Thank you to @tetrcollege for the invite to speak about building @pennant_ai at your NYC Industry Connect event. I was super impressed by the breadth + depth of what Tetr students are building, bringing their unique perspectives shaped across 4 markets over 4 semesters (so far) to inform how they'll build AI-native companies in New York. Saw lots of common themes with our @ycombinator summer batch in terms of industry focus, high-agency founders, and market positioning, and heard ideas spanning from fresh D2C plays, a new approach to EdTech, to empowering users to earn money between their LLM prompts. Looking forward to following this cohort's journey.
Couldn't have put it better! Our standard at @pennant_ai is "does this solve our former boss and teammates' hair on fire problems?"
Ryan Nowicki Stewart retweeted
The earnings call gets the headlines. The shareholder vote can change the company.
CEO compensation. Board control. Major corporate transactions.
Some of the biggest decisions at public companies are shaped through shareholder votes - but most people never see the work behind them.
@rywicks spent years inside that process.
At State Street, he met with boards and C-suites and helped the firm arrive at voting decisions as a major institutional shareholder.
Later, at PJT, he sat on the other side of the table, advising companies navigating those same investors.
And behind a single decision could be thousands of pages of SEC filings, third-party research and years of internal notes.
Ryan describes the workflow as “a total patchwork”
So he and his co-founder @0xtotaylor - who he’s known since undergrad and started alongside at BlackRock - built @pennant_ai
Pennant is building the corporate governance OS for institutional investors.
The platform brings meetings, filings, proposals, voting policies and decision records into one place - helping teams analyze and coordinate proxy voting, apply their own principles at scale and maintain a clear record of how decisions were made.
And because Ryan and Tommy spent years working with the exact people they’re now building for, their product bar is simple:
Would our former bosses and teammates use this day in and day out?
That mindset has shaped how they build.
Instead of guessing what customers need, the Pennant team spends time on the desk with institutional investors, starts with their biggest problem and builds from there.
Know the workflow deeply enough, and your former job can become your startup’s unfair advantage.
🎙️ @rywicks CEO & Co-Founder, @pennant_ai on @Fondocom @thestartpod
00:57 From BlackRock and State Street to building Pennant
01:27 The hidden governance layer behind public companies
02:05 Meeting Tim Cook as Nike’s compensation committee chair
03:47 How boards think about CEO pay and incentives
05:42 Why shareholder voting matters to institutional investors
06:08 The thousands-of-pages “patchwork” Pennant is replacing
07:18 Building software their former teammates would actually use
08:17 Why Pennant starts with each client’s biggest problem
Ryan Nowicki Stewart retweeted
New EP on @thestartpod 1:30PM PT, don't miss it 🎙️
Thank you to @davj and the awesome team at @Fondocom for having me on to talk about building @pennant_ai, if you want be ahead of the post-AGI corporate governance wave, let's talk!
The earnings call gets the headlines. The shareholder vote can change the company.
CEO compensation. Board control. Major corporate transactions.
Some of the biggest decisions at public companies are shaped through shareholder votes - but most people never see the work behind them.
@rywicks spent years inside that process.
At State Street, he met with boards and C-suites and helped the firm arrive at voting decisions as a major institutional shareholder.
Later, at PJT, he sat on the other side of the table, advising companies navigating those same investors.
And behind a single decision could be thousands of pages of SEC filings, third-party research and years of internal notes.
Ryan describes the workflow as “a total patchwork”
So he and his co-founder @0xtotaylor - who he’s known since undergrad and started alongside at BlackRock - built @pennant_ai
Pennant is building the corporate governance OS for institutional investors.
The platform brings meetings, filings, proposals, voting policies and decision records into one place - helping teams analyze and coordinate proxy voting, apply their own principles at scale and maintain a clear record of how decisions were made.
And because Ryan and Tommy spent years working with the exact people they’re now building for, their product bar is simple:
Would our former bosses and teammates use this day in and day out?
That mindset has shaped how they build.
Instead of guessing what customers need, the Pennant team spends time on the desk with institutional investors, starts with their biggest problem and builds from there.
Know the workflow deeply enough, and your former job can become your startup’s unfair advantage.
🎙️ @rywicks CEO & Co-Founder, @pennant_ai on @Fondocom @thestartpod
00:57 From BlackRock and State Street to building Pennant
01:27 The hidden governance layer behind public companies
02:05 Meeting Tim Cook as Nike’s compensation committee chair
03:47 How boards think about CEO pay and incentives
05:42 Why shareholder voting matters to institutional investors
06:08 The thousands-of-pages “patchwork” Pennant is replacing
07:18 Building software their former teammates would actually use
08:17 Why Pennant starts with each client’s biggest problem
Ryan Nowicki Stewart retweeted
The earnings call gets the headlines. The shareholder vote can change the company.
CEO compensation. Board control. Major corporate transactions.
Some of the biggest decisions at public companies are shaped through shareholder votes - but most people never see the work behind them.
@rywicks spent years inside that process.
At State Street, he met with boards and C-suites and helped the firm arrive at voting decisions as a major institutional shareholder.
Later, at PJT, he sat on the other side of the table, advising companies navigating those same investors.
And behind a single decision could be thousands of pages of SEC filings, third-party research and years of internal notes.
Ryan describes the workflow as “a total patchwork”
So he and his co-founder @0xtotaylor - who he’s known since undergrad and started alongside at BlackRock - built @pennant_ai
Pennant is building the corporate governance OS for institutional investors.
The platform brings meetings, filings, proposals, voting policies and decision records into one place - helping teams analyze and coordinate proxy voting, apply their own principles at scale and maintain a clear record of how decisions were made.
And because Ryan and Tommy spent years working with the exact people they’re now building for, their product bar is simple:
Would our former bosses and teammates use this day in and day out?
That mindset has shaped how they build.
Instead of guessing what customers need, the Pennant team spends time on the desk with institutional investors, starts with their biggest problem and builds from there.
Know the workflow deeply enough, and your former job can become your startup’s unfair advantage.
🎙️ @rywicks CEO & Co-Founder, @pennant_ai on @Fondocom @thestartpod
00:57 From BlackRock and State Street to building Pennant
01:27 The hidden governance layer behind public companies
02:05 Meeting Tim Cook as Nike’s compensation committee chair
03:47 How boards think about CEO pay and incentives
05:42 Why shareholder voting matters to institutional investors
06:08 The thousands-of-pages “patchwork” Pennant is replacing
07:18 Building software their former teammates would actually use
08:17 Why Pennant starts with each client’s biggest problem
Long-time listener, first-time caller! Thank you @evanepstein at @boardroomsummit for a timely discussion about what we're building at @pennant_ai.
Evan is uniquely qualified to bridge the tech communities we've been part of this year at @ycombinator & @PalantirTech and the corporate governance space. Look no further than last month, when he kicked of our CorpGov Tech Summit with the @Society4CorpGov in a 1-on-1 with @ericries that previewed the debate playing out now on the coming @AnthropicAI S-1, among other key issues that are going to shape post-AGI governance in public and private markets.
E222 is out with @rywicks, co-founder & CEO of @getpennantai
We discuss how AI is changing corporate governance, and why human judgment still matters. #corpgov
YouTube, Apple and Spotify links below.
🎧 Simplecast boardroom-governance.simplec…
