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

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: