To the best of Erik Ralston’s memory, there was only one computer class available at Hanford High School in Richland when he was a student.

He signed up for the course and aced it.

“It was the first time I ever got 100% on a test,” Ralston recalled.

The class turned out to be pivotal. Not only did it cement Ralton’s talent for all things tech, “it was probably the moment I realized, ‘You could make a living at this,’” he said.

Ralston, now 40, went on to do exactly that – he’s made a name for himself as a developer and an entrepreneur, all the while lifting others up as his career soared.

He’s served for years as a mentor at Fuse in Richland, a business and community accelerator that he also co-founded.

In the beginning

Ralston was born in Washington, D.C., and moved to Richland with his family as a child. His father, who’d retired from the Army, took a job at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Growing up, Ralston loved computers and video games, and after high school he went off to Washington State University in Pullman, where he earned a computer science degree.

He launched into the tech world after graduation, working as a lead mobile developer for Flex Rental Solutions and Bedloo. In 2015, he joined the Australian startup LiveTiles, becoming the U.S. technical leader. The job sent him around the world and taught him about everything from enterprise collaboration to landing big customers, he said.

Then in 2020, Ralston – who’s married to his high school sweetheart, Morgan, with whom he has three kids – helped start the software company Soundbite.ai.

Ralston serves as the chief technology officer, in addition to being co-founder.

Soundbite.ai is a next generation short-form communication platform that integrates with Microsoft 356. The company has more than 40 corporate clients and nearly 200,000 users around the world, including in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and India.

The software helps with internal communication, such as videos and podcasts – sharing them securely, managing access, allowing for interaction, tracking analytics and more.

“Whether you’re looking to boost employee engagement, share important updates, or simply connect with your team, we’ve got you covered,” the company’s website says.

Soundbite.ai incorporates AI, largely with the “longtail,” such as transcribing videos and helping create news articles from those transcriptions, for example.

Secret sauce

In Ralston’s view, AI isn’t going away anytime soon.

“I think it will be a sauce on every piece of technology. It’ll be this secret sauce inside of every dish that every developer is creating,” he said.

Ralston also said he’s proud of what the Soundbite.ai team has created. The future is bright, and people should reach out to learn more or invest, he said.

A Fuse mentor

As Ralston continues to build the company, he’s also boosting others in the Tri-Cities as a co-founder and mentor at Fuse.

Paul Carlisle, Fuse’s executive director, called him an early investor in the Tri-Cities’ entrepreneurial ecosystem.

“Through extensive time, talent and resources, he has worked tirelessly to help others succeed. The success of those local entrepreneurs, born of the risk they took, has formed much of the positive change in the community that we enjoy today. I’m thankful for Erik and his tireless efforts to build a better community through the growth of local business ownership,” Carlisle said. 

Fuse started as a co-working space in 2014, and it’s grown into a business and community accelerator with programs such as Launch University, aimed at helping entrepreneurs bring their business ideas to life.

Ralston sees the Tri-Cities – the place that helped stoke his interest in computers and that’s been his home base as he built a successful career in the software world — as a great place for entrepreneurs. It’s full of resources like Fuse, he said.

“The Tri-Cities is a world class place for startups because if you have a good idea, you can make it happen,” he said. “The power of the internet is that you can make a born-global business from the Tri-Cities. You can be wherever you want to be.”