Ryan Ozonian is a successful mobile media entrepreneur and CEO and co-founder, with backer Mark Cuban, of Dust Messaging. Dust was inspired by the belief that everyone has the right to conduct private conversation; online or off. Ozonian and his Silicon-beach based team at Dust have developed a patent-pending, all-in-memory secure messaging technology. Since its beta launch (then known as Cyber Dust) in 2015, Dust has been downloaded by millions of people, who’ve sent over a billion business and personal messages.

Ozonian began his career developing social gaming Apps as an undergrad, interning at Onegative Media, where he worked on some of the first social games that exploited built-in popularity and growth of platforms like Facebook. After graduating, he launched and bootstrapped Mention Mobile, a game development company that specialized in incorporating real friends into casual social games, including Word Derby — built on a custom asynchronous platform — which became a Top 10 gaming App. Under his leadership, Mention Mobile secured partnerships and publishing deals with Electronic Arts and Chillingo.

Despite string of successful games to his credit, Ozonian found himself in need of additional operating capital to develop releases. This lead him to “Shark Tank” regular, Billionaire Mark Cuban, who was known to be bullish on social and mobile games. Ozonian outlined concepts in an email sent through Cuban’s blog, got a response; and the two have been working together ever since.

Ozonian was recently named to Forbes “30 Under 30.” He is a frequent speaker on topics ranging from cyber security and messaging to fundraising and entrepreneurialism. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in Communication from USC.