Austin, Texas
Vertically integrated companies in regulated industries overdue for reinvention.
What I'm building now
RonanRx · Y Combinator S26
I built Armbrust American to fix a broken supply chain. RonanRx fixes how GLP-1s get prescribed: personalized tirzepatide, dosed by a real doctor, for your body.
One-size dosing was never built for any individual person. The standard ladder climbs on a fixed schedule whether or not your body agrees, and most people quit somewhere on the way up. RonanRx replaces the label with a physician who reviews your history and sets your dose, your titration, and your adjunct. A licensed pharmacy compounds that exact prescription and ships it to your door.
It starts as a text message, and there is no charge to find out whether it is right for you.
RonanRx is a health technology platform used by licensed physicians for care coordination. It is not a pharmacy. A physician decides whether treatment and any prescription are appropriate, and a licensed pharmacist reviews every order before release. Compounded medications are not FDA approved. A physician can say no.
The pattern
Four companies over twenty five years, all running the same play. Find an industry where a chain of intermediaries has inserted itself between the person who makes something and the person who needs it. Then own the whole chain.
★ Made in America · Made in Texas · Built from raw material up ★
Ventures
A full stack pharmaceutical company using AI to make personalized medicine possible at scale, starting with peptides and GLP-1s. RonanRx owns the patient relationship, the health data, the personalization software, and the prescribing workflow, and works with a licensed Texas pharmacy to compound and dispense. Founded with Emily Colman.
ronanrx.com →Fulfillment, without excuses. We sold over a million units direct to consumer in the first months of the mask business and discovered the fulfillment partner we needed did not exist, so we built that too. Cost plus twenty percent, published openly. ISO 13485, ISO 9001, FDA registered facility.
founders3pl.com →American made masks and nitrile gloves, started when US doctors and nurses were forced to rely on foreign PPE. From raw plastic to finished product, the factory was producing a million masks a day within six months. We also built a lab that tests every mask we can get our hands on against the standard it claims to meet, and publishes every result. Most do not pass.
armbrustusa.com →Backed by Y Combinator, OwnLocal spent fourteen years helping local newspapers move into the digital age and generated a billion dollars for them. Taken private in 2020, sold in 2025. I remain on the board, still convinced that AI can save local journalism rather than kill it.
How it started
It started at thirteen, selling newspapers door to door in Duluth, Minnesota. Watching how much that community relied on local news, I studied journalism at York, then grew uneasy as big corporations swallowed small papers and the internet gutted the industry. So I spent fourteen years trying to fix it.
When COVID hit, the problem was physical instead of digital, but the shape was identical: something essential, and no domestic capacity to make it. We built the factory. When foreign competitors dumped product below cost and the US Trade Representative urged me to file an anti dumping case, I decided to out build them instead. Automation and computer vision took the line from a hundred and twenty people down to seven, and made the masks faster and better.
We don't need a bailout. We don't need other countries. We need full supply chain control and no foreign dependence. Made in America, made in Texas.
Then the fulfillment layer turned out to be broken too, so that became a company. The regulatory habits we had picked up making a medical device, lot tracking, expiration control, inspecting every unit instead of sampling, turned out to be exactly what other serious brands needed.
Pharmaceutical manufacturing was the best combination of digital, physical, biological, and regulatory infrastructure I could find. So that is what I am doing now.
Armbrust American went from raw plastic to finished masks. RonanRx goes from patient biology to personalized medicine.
Away from work
Father of six, ages four to twenty. Growing a longhorn herd at the Armbrust Howdy Ranch outside Austin, Texas.