This page is a summary of a life spanning decades replete with endless unexpected turns. A winding career path with jobs I never knew existed. A friendship with a dog named after a president. A personality that oscillates wildly between crippling insecurity and relentless narcissism. This is the story of Ryan Lobrano.
My formative years were spent on military bases as my father was in the Air Force. Half of my schooling years were spent overseas in places like Japan, Germany, and Turkey. The other half was in glamorous Texas, California, and Pennsylvania. Upon finishing high school I started college at LSU; I made it about a year and a half before I realized I had no idea what I was doing and they didn’t want me to come back for awhile.
I joined the Air Force because they’d pay for my school in the long run and I was pretty confident I could get a pretty nice job while in the service. I was able to become a linguist, and ended up being taught Arabic in Monterey, California before becoming a translator at the National Security Agency in Maryland. The job was enjoyable for a bit, but it wasn’t long before I became disillusioned with the military and government service in general. I could have landed a decent job as a contractor and bilked American taxpayers out of money for years, but instead I went all the way back to college to become a 26 year old freshman.
College was great. I had no idea what I wanted to do in life so spent six years changing majors twice a semester. Most of my friends had graduated and begun their careers with real earnings while I was a college student creeping up on 30 that was barely getting by. To pay the bills I started working in a restaurant in Baton Rouge called Juban’s. The place was amazing and I still have dreams about it to this day. I’ll certainly write some about that on this blog. I finally finished school while working at this restaurant and realized I needed to grow out of that role. I orchestrated my exit.
My journey took me over to Dallas, Texas where I started in an absolutely terrible startup for absolutely abysmal pay. I could have made dramatically more working in a restaurant, but I knew I needed to start working in an office to actually get my life on the path I wanted. The startup got acquired by an awful company, my role evolved and became more awful but did open the door to my next gig that would take me into sales. That next company was a small outfit with terrible leadership and an awful product, but it did set the foundation for my sales career. I was fired from that job with no warning and no explanation.
I decided to head farther west. The choice was between Seattle, Washington and Denver, Colorado. My prior sales territory was Washington and Oregon so I had spent a lot of time in Seattle and really liked the city, but the job (and weather) in Denver were a better option in the end. I arrived in Denver ready to become a man of the mountains and start a brand new network. I made this move in January 2020. The events over the next few months made me come to really dislike Denver for a number of reasons and I decided to head back to Dallas.
It was after that return that I was recruited for my current role, still in tech sales. It’s an amazing job that has let me learn aspects about sales, business, and technology that I had never considered. I’m at a point where I can finally relax a little and have begun to reflect on everything that’s brought me here, what’s going on around me, and what lies ahead. I started this site to put these thoughts into words.