EXCLUSIVE: Insiders say Newchip’s Andrew Ryan duped clients, sexually harassed employees, and mismanaged the company. He says they’re staging a coup.
n late 2019, a seasoned startup investor took a meeting with a young Army veteran and UT Austin alum named Andrew Ryan. The 28-year-old was full of big ideas, claiming he was going to “democratize entrepreneurship” with a new program training startup founders.
“We did not align ourselves to his values and character, as a human being and as a businessman,” this person said, although Ryan told the Daily Beast he left voluntarily to work on other projects.Newchip appeared to be a success. Conceived as an online marketplace for casual investors, the company raised $2 million in seed funding and drew more than 50,000 users in its first year in operation.
In an email to The Daily Beast, Ryan defended his leadership style, saying that “driving a visionary company can sometimes require assertive communication and ambitious goal setting.” He added that the role of CEO “require[s] final decision-making authority in most companies,” but that he “emphasized a balanced approach.” He said he let go of the executive coach because it was too expensive and he would have been the only CEO enrolled in the group program.
Ryan denied making inappropriate comments and asking employees about their sex lives. He said any invitation to his hot tub would have been “part of the broader social invitation to the small team at the time,” and called the allegation that seating arrangements were influenced by his behavior “fundamentally false.”
“I just haven’t felt like I have with you with anyone else in years and it’s starting to hit me,” he wrote, according to screenshots provided to The Daily Beast. “You were a surprise to me, and working closely with you—you’re so smart and passionate, you just get me and that means a lot to me.” Ryan acknowledged to The Daily Beast that this employee had rejected his advances but said their relationship had developed, over the course of several months, into something that “extended beyond the professional realm.” He said they spent time together outside work and traveled together and that “a lot of the staff knew we were dating.” When the relationship ended, he said, he apologized to the employee and initiated an HR and board review.
Ryan said he demanded their resignations after a “blow up” between them at the office, though he said it was because they had violated a rule against managers dating subordinates. He acknowledged that “there's hypocrisy in that.” “There was no way the warrants were [worth that much] and he knew it,” a former executive told The Daily Beast, adding that Ryan was “saying horrifically untrue things, and he was raising money off of it.”
At the same time, this employee said, Ryan was obsessed with getting negative reviews of the company scrubbed from the internet. When the ratings on sites like Trustpilot got bad enough, this employee said, Ryan would instruct him to offer unhappy founders a refund to take down a bad review and threatened to fire him when he pushed back.“Get the reviews down I don’t care tf who does it,” Ryan wrote in a text message to the employee reviewed by The Daily Beast.
The mood at Newchip grew even more tense after the bankruptcy. One former employee said Ryan did not announce the filing to employees, and later told them he did not think it was important enough to mention. Rumors swirled about whether the company had enough money to make payroll.On April 26, the employees arrived at work to learn that the general counsel, board chair, and newly hired vice president of operations were gone.
“These key personnel were instrumental in maintaining the company's integrity and fostering a transparent work environment,” they wrote, in a letter reviewed by The Daily Beast. “The employees believe that their removal has led to an erosion of trust and morale within the organization, creating a toxic work environment.”
On May 11, Judge Shad Robinson of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Western District of Texas held a hearing on a motion to convert Newchip’s bankruptcy to Chapter 7, also known as liquidation.
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