Ryan Temple

Hooked on iPhone games — Temple Run, Flappy Bird. Saw the money, saw a skill I could learn. Started building little games in Objective-C.

Senior year of high school — Swift is announced. Switched immediately and started building games in it.

Shipped The College App — my first real thing. Yik Yak had just been pulled from the App Store, so I built the version I wanted: an anonymous campus feed, paired with events and polls and the option to post as yourself. Took off at my school. Slowly grew to a few other campuses. Eventually closed it down to focus on new projects.

Built SlidePal — my own friending / dating app. Wanted to get away from swiping, so I focused on sliding (hence the name). Launched it quietly. Never really pursued it — there was a more exciting opportunity in front of me.

Out of college, joined a Manhattan startup as founding engineer for Geneva. The pitch: an IRC chat platform — a third place. Discord for gamers, Slack for work, Geneva for everything else.

Six years on Geneva. The entire lifecycle. Built the app from the ground up. Learned from teammates, debated, rebuilt, shipped — full ownership, end-to-end. The kind of work that ruins you for other work.

In the meantime, shipped FunRun.ai — write words on a map and go run them. Tossed a clip on TikTok, it went a little viral, the downloads followed.

Acquired by Bumble. Diligence, compliance, the whole regulatory checklist — months of paperwork.

Shipped my second AI-coded app — quietly the work I’m most invested in. Book2Life is an AI-powered reading app: read your favorite books, or have them narrated to you in voices that don’t feel synthetic. Live summaries as you read, visual portraits of the characters, scenes from the current chapter, explanations of anything that doesn’t quite click. The reading experience I always wanted. I use it daily.

Bumble BFF on the roadmap. Geneva integrated, rebuilt, relaunched, and rebranded under the Bumble umbrella — millions of new hands.

On the side: building egod — a decentralized platform for spreading good. Use Dogecoin to publicly fund proposals that help out in the community. Still building.

Launched Banter with two friends — a Jackbox-style party game. Very fun, free.