As one of Audible’s longest-tenured employees, Ryan Eland has been profoundly affected by his time here, both professionally and personally. “I met my wife at Audible, twenty years ago,” he says. It’s a good thing he happened to spot the posting in his local newspaper in 2002, seeking applicants for Audible’s customer service team. “I’ve always been an early adopter,” he explains, so he was excited about the cutting-edge technology Audible was developing in order to do something that had never been done before: make it possible to listen to virtually any book, anywhere. Plus, Ryan lived very near to our offices in New Jersey. Applying was a no-brainer.  

“Right away, I was genuinely impressed by how passionate everyone was about their work and how mission-driven the company felt,” says Ryan. The shared vision, coupled with Audible’s small size — at the time, comprising a single floor of an office building — made for a close-knit, familial environment. While today, Audible’s headquarters feature free catered lunches for employees, Ryan recalls how “somebody would go across the street to Costco on a weekly basis, load up a cart with a bunch of snacks, and roll it back over. We had an honor system in place where anything that anyone took cost 25 cents. It’s amazing to see how far we’ve come,” he laughs.  

Even though the company was small and scrappy, with less than 100 employees and a website that Ryan says “seemed to crash whenever there was a flood of traffic,” he and his colleagues “knew we had something special, and it was a matter of time before everyone else would know it, too.” After about two years, he moved to the marketing team as a Field Account Manager. Before the invention of smartphones, iPods were the most promising method for listening to several full-sized audiobooks on the go. There was a program in place at retail electronics stores where, if customers signed up for 12 months of Audible membership, they’d get $100 off their iPod purchase. Ryan’s job was to travel across the US, training store employees on how Audible worked and how it could help increase their iPod sales. 

In his twenty-plus years at Audible, Ryan has had a front row seat to the technological shifts that affect everyday life. For instance, very early on, it could take an entire day or night for a customer to download an audiobook, given that most modems were capable of only 56 kpbs speeds. This was especially painful if they lost their internet connection before it was done, which was common then, and had to start over. The advent of faster broadband internet was a game-changer, he reports, enabling customers to download more books in less time.  

Then came a day Ryan will never forget. “I was woken up at 6 a.m. by a colleague letting me know Amazon had acquired us,” he recalls. “And I remember being devastated because I really loved my job at Audible and thought it was over. But that turned out to be the furthest thing from the truth. Amazon acquiring us was very positive.” The access to Amazon’s advanced, new technologies turned out to be integral to Audible’s explosive worldwide growth, and along with it, Ryan’s career.  

Ryan then moved into a product manager role — in fact, he’s Audible’s first official Product Manager — and was part of the core team that released the very first versions of the Audible app for iOS and Android. “I was still very junior at the time,” he recalls, “still learning the product management ropes, but it was great to be part of that team” working on what would quickly become the most common way our customers engage with Audible. From there, he moved through various roles, including Technical Program Manager, Quality Assurance Manager, and Product Marketing Manager. He stayed on the marketing team, eventually becoming Senior Director of Global Customer Engagement.  

Ryan is an avid listener, indulging in suspense/thrillers and biographies and memoirs such as Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog and Tara Westover’s Educated, whose narrator, Julia Whelan, is a favorite. “I’ll sometimes look for things just because they’re narrated by Julia Whelan,” he says. “I listen probably 150 hours each month: while I’m in the car, walking the dog, doing chores — I’ve always got an earbud in my ear.”  

When he looks back on his two decades at Audible, Ryan says he feels proud of how far the company has come, and grateful for the leaders who’ve helped him along the way and the friends he’s made. Not to mention his marriage, and the “two beautiful daughters” he and his wife have had since meeting at work all those years ago. “You could say Audible has had a really big impact on my life.” 

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