Ryan Berk

Ryan Berk is a co-founder and partner of Stoic Holdings, a Denver-based private investment firm he launched in 2014 with his childhood friend Michael Dworkis. Stoic was formed to build long-term value by making concentrated investments in a small number of excellent businesses and taking an active role in their growth — funded, per contemporaneous reporting, by roughly 30 backing investors. Rather than passive minority checks, Berk and Dworkis pursue majority ownership and step directly into operating roles at the companies they acquire.

Before founding Stoic, Berk built a career in investment banking and private equity. He was an investment professional at East Rock Capital, an investment-management firm that manages capital for high-net-worth families; earlier he worked at TowerBrook Capital Partners, a control-oriented private equity firm, and at Evercore Partners, where he focused on financial restructuring. He holds a business degree from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin.

Alongside his investing work, Berk has taken on senior operating roles. He served as Chief Strategy Officer (and Chief Financial Officer) at PartnerHero, a customer-experience and support outsourcing company, where he was responsible for building the finance, corporate-development, and innovation functions. (Note: a separate executive named Ryan Berk — a multi-unit fitness operator appointed CEO of SavATree in October 2025 — is a different individual and is not covered in this profile.)

When Stoic acquired Store It Cold in 2015, Berk and Dworkis stepped in as co-CEOs, reflecting the firm's hands-on approach of pairing capital with direct management involvement.

• Concentrated, control investing: Stoic makes a small number of majority-stake investments in "excellent businesses" and takes an active management role rather than spreading many passive bets.
• Profitable lower-middle-market targets: The firm seeks established U.S. companies with $1M–$10M in annual profit — often "older, less prominent" businesses with proven products and strong customer value propositions.
• Value-based product conviction: On the CoolBot deal, the founders framed their interest around unit economics — "a product that delivers an immense value proposition versus the alternatives" (vs. $4,000–$5,000 legacy cold-storage systems).
• Operator-investor model: Berk and his partner are willing to run the companies they buy (they became co-CEOs of Store It Cold), leveraging backgrounds in "corporate management, public and private equity investing, and investment banking."