- x-time founder
- full stack software architect
- free agent developer & operator
Summary
I love what I do. I love building products and businesses from very early doors. I love building teams and solving tough product and engineering challenges. I love ideas. I love being challenged and challenging others. I get to do this every day, and so I feel incredibly forunate.
I founded my first startup in university with a brilliant co-founder. We bootstrapped that business to 7-figure revenue in 3 years.
Since then I've founded or been instrumental in the early stages of a number of tech or operationally-intensive companies (generating real revenue) in various capacities - typically leading operations or tech. In my previous position I was the first technical hire and CTO at a blockchain startup, raising pre-seed funding from several prominent US VCs.
Currently I'm leading tech @ CetoAI. We closed a £1.5m pre-seed round in 2023, are currently raising a seed round, and are looking for brilliant engineers to join us.
I'm deeply curious about the nature of reality and experience itself and have a strong desire to help ensure that we as a civilization fulfil our potential out in the stars (rather than destroying ourselves before we get there). To that end, I am a regular (very small) donor to the Future of Life Institute.
In the long run, everything tends towards the cost of energy.
Contact me to discuss anything
✌️
Tech stack
Vue is my go-to for frontend development, with NuxtJS for SSR web apps, typically hooked up to MongoDB. I also build in React (this site is built in NextJS). For both, serverless / edge deployments are my strong preference, wherever the requirements allow.
For backend or general scripting, PHP is still great (especially Laravel) and I've built APIs and scripts in various Python frameworks. And of course NodeJS for simplicity.
At system language level, I write Rust, know some Solidity, and have hooked up various EVM (L1 and L2) contracts with web3.js and ethers.js.
From a production and infra perspective, I've led teams deploying on AWS, GCP and Azure. Project management for small teams works best on Linear in my experience. And, avoids the huge setup of the Atlassian suite which I use if needs require.
For design I use Figma, but know the Adobe suite pretty well too, as well as AutoCAD for 2D technical drawings.
What people say
I'm lucky to have worked with, managed and mentored a some fantastic people. Here's what some of them have said:
Ian Rowan
ML and blockchain expert
"Ben and I worked together at DAOHQ where Ben was the CTO. Upon joining DAOHQ, I was amazed by the infrastructure Ben had led the team to set up. The stack and engineering culture at this pre-seed startup mirrored and exceeded what I had worked with at medium-enterprise levels. That said this was one of the most robust web application architectures I've worked with up to this point. Ben also did a great job at pushing engineers, including myself, to become truly full stack while he himself took time to understand the technologies that domain-experts were working on within the company to make seamless decisions on the direction of the application. These practices led to an innovative, efficient engineering culture with a small team, unmatched by many larger teams."
"Pros:
- world class communicator
- inventive
- reliable
- deeply understands people
Cons:
- invents his own JavaScript keywords sometimes"
Thanks to Mikhail for the deep insights as always.
Mikhail Andreev
Superstar full stack engineer
Emmet Halm
Founder @ DAOHQ
"Ben is a brilliant engineer and a great leader. Ben has been a pleasure to work with. I wouldn't hesitate an instant before building with him again"
This quote and the context was generated by CoPilot. I then showed Emmmet, who "agreed with it wholeheartedly" and added the last sentence.