Kyle Rygg

He Didn't Chase a Job. He Followed the People.

Kyle Rygg didn't come to Pine Cove looking for a tech job. He came for a cup of coffee with a guy he'd met through football. That guy was Brandon. The two had crossed paths through the NIL program Brandon was building with the Bozeman football team, but they'd never really talked. So Kyle sent a message on LinkedIn and asked to grab coffee. A friend had mentioned Pine Cove was "some kind of tech company." That was about all he knew going in.

"I had no real idea what we did. It was more just, I have an engineering degree, I can figure out the technical side, and I like talking to people."

That combination turned out to be exactly right. Kyle started part-time, doing sales development work during his final football season, testing it out fifteen or twenty hours a week while his classes were online. He liked it. A few months later, that February after his last game, he came on full time. Three years in, he's one of the four people on Pine Cove's sales team.

From the Defensive Line to Technical Sales

Kyle grew up in Eugene, Oregon, and came to Bozeman for college. First just for school, then on a football scholarship that kept him on the defensive line for six years (a redshirt season and the COVID year stretched it out).

He earned a degree in mechanical engineering along the way, and a serious knee injury his junior year, the kind that meant flying home to Oregon for surgery, shaped the timing of everything that came next.

Ask him what carries over from engineering into sales, and it isn't the formulas. It's the way an engineer learns to think.

"It's not necessarily what you learn, but the skill set of how you learn stuff, being able to figure things out."

That shows up when he's reading floor plans and construction documents, or working alongside engineers like Jordan, Mike, and Jackson to put a large network together. Pine Cove does technical sales, and Kyle's background lets him speak both languages: the customer's and the engineer's.

The Athlete's Edge

Kyle isn't the only former athlete on staff, and he doesn't think that's a coincidence. Sports, he says, build a kind of competitiveness that translates straight into the work. Sales rewards effort, and he already knew how to compete for it.

"At the end of the day, sales is an effort game. Taking that competitive side to it, that's more valuable than anything else I learned in college."

What Keeps Him Here

Ask Kyle what he likes most about the job and he skips right past the technology. It's the people, on both sides of the relationship. His favorite kind of customer meeting is the one where five minutes cover the actual work and the next fifty cover their kids, their town, and whatever's going on in their lives.

"They're not just purely transactional. You actually know these people, and they become your friends."

One Big Team

That closeness runs through the whole company, too. Most people at Pine Cove, Kyle included, came in through a personal relationship rather than a job listing, and it shows in how the team operates day to day, even fully remote and spread across several states.

That distance is also something Kyle has learned to answer head-on. When a customer in Colorado wonders how a Montana company can really take care of them, he has an easy response: sending someone from Wyoming is about three hours shorter than driving across the state of Montana. The team travels, shows up in person, and turns a wide service area into something that feels local.

Outside of Work

The same drive that made him a defensive tackle now points in a very different direction. Kyle traded the size he carried on the line for trail running and mountain biking (a downhill full-suspension rig, with a gravel bike on order). Trail running, especially, became his thing after football.

"Trail running is way more entertaining, and once you get over that initial hump, it's way easier on your body than pounding the pavement."

How far? Right around the time of this conversation, he was training for the River of No Return Endurance Run in the Idaho wilderness: roughly seventy miles (about 108 kilometers), with a couple of buddies and a goal of finishing well under the cutoff.

Staying in Bozeman was a deliberate choice, a chance to actually live in a mountain town without the full-time demands of college and football. His sister is in Boise and his parents are back in Oregon, so he lines up his work trips to Idaho with visits home whenever he can.

One Word for Pine Cove

When asked to pick a single word for the company, Kyle didn't hesitate.

Family.

"Even though we're remote and spread out, everyone's just very close, one big team. That's pretty hard to find."

He'll admit he's biased. Most of the people he works with, he knew through a relationship of some kind before they were ever colleagues. But at Pine Cove, that isn't the exception. That's how it works.