Ryan Vet started his first registered company at 14, building a multinational marketing firm that eventually served 250 clients across 25 countries. By the time he sold his AI-driven gig-economy platform in 2020, he’d already served as president or CEO of six companies including one he helped lead to a $750 million valuation. But it was what he observed during those 20 years in leadership that changed the trajectory of his career entirely.
“Across every industry I worked in—software, hospitality, media—the same pattern kept showing up,” Vet says. “Teams would hit walls not because of strategy or resources, but because different generations couldn’t communicate with each other. The friction was costing companies millions.”
Now a USA TODAY bestselling author and generational futurist, Vet has pivoted from building companies to solving what he sees as the most overlooked problem in modern business: the workplace gaps between generations, ranging from the Silent Generation all the way to Gen Z employees, and soon Gen Alpha. Through his generational workplace consulting, he helps executives decode the patterns that cause teams to break down along age lines.
From Tech Founder to Pattern Detective
Vet’s resume reads like a crash course in entrepreneurship. He integrated AI into his software product uCondition back in 2010, years before it became ubiquitous. He helped bring a medical device to market that reduced injection-site pain for local anesthetics. He founded Boon, which was acquired after building a professional gig-economy marketplace powered by artificial intelligence.
But after the Boon sale, he noticed something consistent across sales floors, marketing departments, and return-to-office debates: the root cause was rarely about policy or performance. It was about generational mistrust and miscommunication. His work has shown this generational breakdown to account for upwards of $525 billion in cost to comapnies in the US alone each year.
His research method is unconventional. Through his newsletter Collide, Vet analyzes cultural flashpoints most business consultants ignore—Sesame Street programming changes, MTV shutting down, AOL ending dial-up service, Barnes & Noble’s brick-and-mortar expansion—to identify recurring patterns that leaders can apply to their own organizations.
Pattern Recognition Over Prediction
“I don’t predict the future,” Vet explains. “I show people how to read it by understanding how societal cycles shape each generation—and how those cycles show up inside teams right now.”
He has been featured in Financial Times, USA TODAY, Forbes, and on CBS, ABC, and NBC. He’s delivered over 1,000 keynotes and now serves on two advisory boards at Elon University while teaching leadership as an adjunct professor at William Peace University.
For organizations struggling with retention, hybrid work policies, or cross-generational collaboration, Vet offers something most consultants can’t: two decades of executive experience combined with research-backed insights on workplace culture. His approach turns what many see as an HR problem into a strategic advantage—if you know how to read the patterns.
“The companies that figure this out first,” Vet says, “won’t just retain talent better. They’ll make decisions faster, with less friction and more trust.” For a leader who launched his first business before he could drive, that’s a future worth building toward.
