Ryan Willson
In October of 2024, Ryan Willson joined Townsend Asset Management as their Chief Commercial Officer. Ryan is responsible for working with the team of this long established wealth management firm to lead and further develop their elite client service experience. He brings to Townsend thirty years of experience in the asset management business.
Ryan is a third-generation investor and entrepreneur, and he has spent his career launching, building, and growing asset management firms. Ryan started his career on Wall Street with Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch. He then founded Willson Investment Management, followed by seventeen years as Partner and CEO of Lateef Investment Management. While at Lateef, he led the firm from $300 million in assets under management to over $6 billion before and after the Global Financial Crisis. Ryan facilitated the succession plans of the firm to the next generation, negotiated multiple private equity transactions, and he left following the sale of the firm in 2017. In 2020, Ryan joined quantitative machine learning hedge fund Creighton AI as their CEO to launch the firms first fund. He raised the working capital to sustain the firm’s growth plans during 2020, and he raised the seed capital to launch the CAI Fund in January of 2021. When Ryan left the firm in February of 2022 CAI had $185m assets under management. Ryan joined Storm Capital Partners in the first quarter of 2023 as a Partner. Storm is a consulting firm serving investment management firms to help them scale their businesses.
Ryan has a Bachelor’s Degree in Communication Arts and Sciences from the University of Southern California. He has been married for thirty years to his wife Cindy and they have two children Chloe and Jackson. In his early years he was a Division One soccer player at Southern Methodist University, and he was the captain of the rugby team at University of Southern California. He is passionate about athletics and has coached youth sports for over twenty years and founded the Marin Reds Rugby Club in California and the Salish Sea Warriors Rugby Club in British Columbia.