Ryan Rippel

Early Life and Education

Ryan Rippel grew up in Mexico, Missouri. His father, who owned a sporting-goods store, was killed in a car accident when Rippel was approximately three years old, leaving his mother to raise Rippel and his sister as a single parent. Rippel has described his mother’s experience navigating poverty and public systems, including disputes with the IRS and challenges accessing child care, as formative to his professional focus on economic mobility. His mother later died of breast cancer, leaving the family with significant medical debt due to inadequate insurance coverage. ^{4 3}

Rippel was named the president of Boys Nation, a civics program sponsored by the American Legion, while in high school. He completed his undergraduate education at Harvard College, and pursued graduate study at the University of Cambridge in 2005 and 2006, where he earned a Master of philosophy degree. He subsequently returned to Harvard Law School, graduating with a J.D. in 2012. While in law school, Rippel held a position as a White House intern, working with the National Economic Council. He also held the position of adjunct professor at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, teaching a course on local government law and urban revitalization. ^{5 6}

Career

Rippel joined the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in the mid-2000s, following the completion of his graduate studies at Cambridge. His early work at the foundation focused on agricultural development in the Global Development division, where he managed a multi-grant initiative called the Global Program for Inclusive Municipal Governance, and a series of grants aimed at generating municipal revenues for anti-poverty initiatives. He also held the position of special assistant and chief of staff to the foundation’s co-chair, William H. Gates, Sr. (Bill Gates’s father), whom Rippel has credited with encouraging him to pursue legal training. ^{5 7 8}

After completing law school, Rippel held the position of founding director of the Gates Foundation’s U.S. Economic Mobility and Opportunity (EMO) strategy, which he launched in 2018. Its strategy focused on helping the more than 45 million Americans earning at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty level — a threshold the foundation used as its primary measure of economic vulnerability. In 2022, the Gates Foundation expanded the strategy with an additional $460 million in grant commitments. Rippel framed the strategy’s goals as increasing economic success, “power and autonomy,” and community belonging for low-income Americans, and emphasized what the foundation described as the role of racism and sexism in perpetuating barriers to upward mobility. The EMO portfolio funded organizations focused on workforce development, access to government benefits, and pressuring small and medium-sized businesses to adopt what the foundation characterized as “good jobs” practices. ^{9 10 11}

Rippel was also a co-founder of Upward Momentum, a nonprofit organization focused on economic mobility. As of 2024, Rippel held a position on the executive board of the Families and Workers Fund (FWF), a grantmaking fund established in 2020 to channel philanthropic capital toward direct cash transfer programs and worker organizing efforts during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The FWF’s funders have included the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, and other left-of-center foundations. ^{2 12 13}

NextLadder Ventures

In July 2025, Rippel became the founding chief executive officer of NextLadder Ventures (NLV), a philanthropic investment organization that receives more than $1 billion in commitments from the Gates Foundation, the Ballmer Group, Stand Together, the Valhalla Foundation, and hedge fund investor John Overdeck. The initiative was structured to deploy a mix of grants, equity investments, and revenue-based financing to both nonprofit and for-profit organizations over fifteen years, with the stated goal of expanding economic opportunity for the more than 90 million Americans the organization contends face systemic barriers to economic mobility. NextLadder Ventures named Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company, as its inaugural technology partner, committing approximately $1.5 million annually in AI access and technical support to the organization’s NextLadder funds. ^{14 15}

NextLadder Ventures funds technology-focused responses to life events like job losses, housing instability, and health crises and funds technology to aid frontline workers, such as social workers, public defenders, and legal aid attorneys, who assist low-income Americans. The initiative has expressed interest in using AI to develop what Rippel described as a single “superagent” capable of helping individuals simultaneously navigate housing searches, job applications, and government benefit access. NextLadder has also invested in a startup focused on using technology to assist individuals in overturning criminal records that limit access to employment, housing, and public programs. In May 2026, TIME magazine recognized Rippel on its TIME100 Philanthropy list for his leadership of NextLadder Ventures. ^{4 15}