START: Ryan Nowicki Stewart, CEO & Co-Founder, Pennant: "The Corporate Governance OS for Public Markets"

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The earnings call gets the headlines. The shareholder vote can change the company.

CEO compensation. Board control. Major corporate transactions.

Some of the biggest decisions at public companies are shaped through shareholder votes - but most people never see the work behind them.

Ryan Nowicki Stewart spent years inside that process.

At State Street, he met with boards and C-suites and helped the firm arrive at voting decisions as a major institutional shareholder.

Later, at PJT, he sat on the other side of the table, advising companies navigating those same investors.

And behind a single decision could be thousands of pages of SEC filings, third-party research and years of internal notes.

Ryan describes the workflow as “a total patchwork.”

So he and his co-founder Tommy - who he’s known since undergrad and started alongside at BlackRock -  built Pennant.

Pennant is building the corporate governance OS for institutional investors.

The platform brings meetings, filings, proposals, voting policies and decision records into one place - helping teams analyze and coordinate proxy voting, apply their own principles at scale and maintain a clear record of how decisions were made.

And because Ryan and Tommy spent years working with the exact people they’re now building for, their product bar is simple:

Would our former bosses and teammates use this day in and day out?

That mindset has shaped how they build.

Instead of guessing what customers need, the Pennant team spends time on the desk with institutional investors, starts with their biggest problem and builds from there.

Know the workflow deeply enough, and your former job can become your startup’s unfair advantage.

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🎙️ Ryan Nowicki Stewart, CEO & Co-Founder, Pennant on Fondo START  
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00:57 From BlackRock and State Street to building Pennant
01:27 The hidden governance layer behind public companies
02:05 Meeting Tim Cook as Nike’s compensation committee chair
03:47 How boards think about CEO pay and incentives
05:42 Why shareholder voting matters to institutional investors
06:08 The thousands-of-pages “patchwork” Pennant is replacing
07:18 Building software their former teammates would actually use
08:17 Why Pennant starts with each client’s biggest problem

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Check out getpennant.ai