Robert Rippee, Ph.D.
educator, Innovator, and Executive Director in Las Vegas, Nevada
A career is rarely linear. Mine has traced an arc across global boardrooms, early-stage startups, and university labs—sometimes too early, sometimes perfectly timed, always driven by the tension between what is and what could be. The enduring lessons? Strategy without execution is theater. Invention without discipline is noise. Growth without purpose is temporary.
For the past decade, I stood at a unique intersection—where academia met entrepreneurship, and public institutions dared to think like startups. At UNLV, I co-founded Black Fire Innovation and founded the UNLV Incubator, not as vanity projects, but as testbeds for a larger hypothesis: that universities, when designed intentionally, can serve as engines of economic transformation. I leave that chapter with the conviction that the hypothesis holds.
As of September 1, 2025, I have retired from UNLV. But “retirement” is a misnomer—it marks not an end, but a refocus. I now serve as Interim Chief Marketing Officer for VIP Play Inc., a sports betting and interactive gaming platform operating at the edge of AI and consumer engagement. I also advise ventures such as The Cookie Department, a CPG-tech company that marries functional food with proprietary language models, and other AI-native firms like DecentralAI and Neurun Inc. Each enterprise navigates a shared terrain: the ambiguity of innovation in an algorithmic age.
My foundation—a Ph.D. in consumer behavior and technology adoption—was never meant for idle theory. It is the lens through which I assess markets, products, and institutions under stress. I am currently writing a book that expands on this lens, reflecting on a decade spent translating research into action and confronting how institutions either adapt or ossify in the face of rapid change.
Across podcasts like The Rebel Revolution and advisory boardrooms alike, I’ve sought to bridge the two worlds that so often regard each other with suspicion: commerce and scholarship. The space between them is where I do my best thinking.
If there is a thread that connects all of this, it is simple: innovation is not a slogan. It is a discipline—a form of problem-solving under uncertainty, driven as much by human behavior as by technology. It is still, for me, unfinished work.