Ruskin Landreth

Ruskin Landreth, who graduated with a BA in Economics and in International Relations in 2011, is senior product manager at Kinessos in San Francisco, California.  While a student at Chico State Ruskin participated in the 2009 National Model United Nations where he received an Outstanding Research Award.  In 2010 Ruskin volunteered for the Guatemala Project as a community interaction manager constructing schools for children in poverty.  After graduation from Chico he earned his certifications in CPR and First aid from the Red Cross, google analytics from Google, and certified professional from BrightEdge.

For most of 2012 Ruskin worked as chief media representative for AmeriCorps. He also worked as  media strategist and reconstructive lead at HOPE village in Minot, North Dakota, where he helped “develop a media strategy to publicize disaster relief utilizing corporate and non-profit resources to rehabilitate the affected area and overcome severe flood damage,” according to his LinkedIn page.  In 2012 Ruskin also found time to work as the media planner for Custer State Park in South Dakota and media representative and job site coordinator for Habitat for Humanity in Iowa City, Iowa. 

In 2013 Ruskin accepted a position as internet marketing specialist for MyNewPlace.com, a division of RealPage Inc. in San Francisco, California.   He has also worked as a marketing analytics and strategy consultant for various firms from 2012 to 2014. 

During 2015 Ruskin worked at Ask.com as senior product manager.  He “Fully integrated with multiple engineering teams to drive technical optimization for speed and performance in one case improving Google’s page speed score from 51 to 83,” according to his LinkedIn page.  In December of 2015 Ruskin was promoted to senior product manager at IAC Publishing Labs (formerly Ask.com).

In 2019 Ruskin accepted his current job with Kinesso where he is a manger “in the Product Development and Marketing world with a keen interest in consumer facing applications, mobile app development, analytics, and large scale enterprise applications,” according to his LinkedIn page.

“Econ is invaluable in my every day decision making,” Ruskin stated in a recent email.  “Combined with statistics, economic minded decision making has empowered me to be confident in the proposals I pitch to stake holders and has earned me the authority among all members of the software development process to make hard decisions on their behalf. There is a term, “data derived decisions” that is incredibly simple to understand, but difficult to implement. Thankfully with the skills I inherited via my education I have been able to dive head first in to data analysis to understand market opportunities, user behavior, and specific technical improvements. Industries and jobs may change, but the foundational understanding instilled by economics will always be indispensable.” (Last Updated 5/29/20)