Ryan Stoner is a Founder, Advisor, and Brand Strategist who helps companies turn brand into a true growth engine.
He’s spent the past two decades leading strategy inside startups and global agencies—including TBWA\Chiat\Day, Phenomenon, Publicis, and Omelet—building frameworks that move ideas from decks to real business impact.
Beyond the work itself, Ryan has helped lead and shape strategy disciplines within agencies—mentoring teams, elevating the craft, and pitching (and winning) the kind of new business that fuels growth and momentum.
Today, he operates as a strategic partner to founders and executives—helping them solve what’s not working, sharpen positioning, and build brands that don’t just compete, but create a category of one. His approach combines storytelling with a systems mindset, turning complex or technical value into something customers understand and teams can scale.
He’s worked with companies like American Express, Intuit, T-Mobile, Warner Bros., Electronic Arts, Aetna, GoodRx, and Jack in the Box, across healthcare, fintech, technology, and consumer.
In parallel, he’s an active angel investor backing early-stage companies with a focus on scalable, culturally relevant ideas that solve real problems.
Outside of work, Ryan is a proud girl dad, cancer survivor, left-hander, and third culture kid shaped by an upbringing spanning Asia to California.
Testimonials
Ryan’s biggest contribution was helping frame the long-term vision and articulating the story we’re going to tell for the next 3-4 years. When it comes to boiling down the complex, asking the hard questions into a compelling story, Ryan is the best.
Ryan fully grasps all-things marketing. He’s strategic and insightful – and always brings great thinking. He helped us identify what is of the most value to our customers and craft new positioning and messaging that immediately impacted our win rate.
How Can I Help You?
I’m very interested in working with ambitious people doing ambitious things. I help companies of all sizes and industries navigate marketing and brand challenges around alignment and potential. My goal is to always work collaboratively with business, marketing, and product leaders to drive growth. Reach out if I can help as a fractional Chief Brand Officer.
Below are several ways I like to add value:
Brand positioning and marketing strategy for companies looking to launch, grow or reignite their brands. I help to define the company’s purpose, better understand its audience, and drive alignment behind a shared goal and plan.
Build brand awareness and equity in new product categories, sales channels, and geographies. Collaborate with your team to create metrics for measuring the success of all marketing programs, instilling a results-oriented marketing team and culture.
Explore new growth opportunities by developing new solution selling strategies or go-to-market plans for launching new products, services, experiences, and content. My entire career has been focused on looking forward and getting ahead of challenges and opportunities. I can help spot the gaps and iterate on solutions.
Connect with customers by building a community, executing strategic partnerships, optimizing traffic acquisition, understanding user needs, and developing a feature roadmap to drive engagement.
Save time by analyzing your marketing workflows and team structure with a fresh perspective to create resources and company-wide systems to drive strategic thinking across your company. I enjoy helping companies do better work with agile teams, both within and external to your organization.
Invest and help to scale startups with intros to angel investors, and support establishing the marketing/growth function to accelerate the founder’s visions in whatever fashion I can. I currently invest primarily in Seed deals after they’ve found a lead investor, but am happy to engage and add value before then.