Ben Standefer Email & Phone Number

San Francisco, Ca, Us

San Francisco, California, Us

Still in Emacs building things. 🛠️

San Francisco, California, Us

Founder & CTO. Command E was acquired by Dropbox in November 2021. Started company and led all product & technology development using JavaScript, Electron, React, SQLite/SQLCipher, full-text search, 35 OAuth API connectors, native desktop integrations, Rails back-end, and more! Recruited a team of 8 world class engineers from WhatsApp, Stripe, Eventbrite.Command E is blazing fast search for everything in your cloud and computer: Google Drive, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Asana, Jira, and 20+ others - all instantly searchable from one keyboard shortcut.Funded by Bain Capital, Craft Ventures, Amplify Partners, and many other great investors and angels.

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Started engineering team. First Round is a top seed stage investment firm in Silicon Valley.Started and led an in-house engineering team to build First Round Network, an online community for startup founders and employees. We took over a legacy code from a contractor and and modernized it as a core platform for founders at First Round. We improved product quality, grew usage, and pioneered the concept of online platforms for VC portfolio founders.• Hired and managed 4 engineers and 2 product managers, building a lean-and-mean First Round Engineering team from scratch• Lead major redesigns and new product launches touching every aspect of the product (LESS, SASS, JavaScript, React)• Launched iOS app build with Turbolinks 5 and a hybrid native/web approach (Turbolinks 5, iOS, Xcode, Swift)• Upgraded major infrastructure pieces including Rails upgrades, databases, search, email, analytics, and permissioning (Rails, Postgres, Redis, Memcached, Elasticsearch, Metabase, Google Analytics)• Learned a ton about investing, VC, and seed-stage companies• Time split: 90% coding, 10% management

Portland, Oregon, Us

Joined as 35th employee through the SimpleGeo acquisition. Earned three US Patents for geolocation technology. Owned the Location, Segmentation, API, and Digital Wallet products. Urban Airship is the leading provider of mobile marketing tools for push notifications, digital wallet, mobile engagement, and app loyalty.Led the SimpleGeo team through the Urban Airship acquisition. The SimpleGeo acquisition brought Urban Airship a San Francisco engineering/executive presence which still thrives today.Accountable for driving the integration of SimpleGeo's location technology with Urban Airship's products. Managed the release of Segments, Urban Airship's largest new product in 2012. Segments enables customers to send targeted push notifications based on location, history, behavior, and preferences. Along with colleagues secured 3 patents for "Processing Location Information"​ (U.S. Patent 8,983,494), "Querying for devices based on location" (U.S. Patent 9,553,838), and "Using a polygon to select a geolocation" (U.S. Patent 9,774,696).Expanded product ownership to Digital Wallet products (Apple Passbook, Google Wallet) in 2013. Worked directly with mobile app owners from major brands (Starbucks, Victoria's Secret, Walmart, Walgreens, REI, ABC, Nike, Alaska Airlines, Redbox, ESPN, Olympics) as Urban Airship launched new segmentation, location, and digital wallet products.

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Joined as 6th employee. SimpleGeo was acquired by Urban Airship in November 2011.Started as Infrastructure Engineer in April 2010, promoted to Director of Development in April 2011. SimpleGeo was acquired by Urban Airship in October 2011.SimpleGeo made it easy for mobile developers to create location-aware applications. SimpleGeo developed GIS algorithms, spatial data structures (R-tree, distributed k-d tree), and distributed databases (Cassandra customizations).

San Francisco, California, Us

Joined as 3rd engineer (12th employee). Eventbrite IPOed in September 2018.Developed core systems and products for online ticket sales using Python and MySQL. Was first de-facto Operations engineer. Reworked databases, webservers, and other infrastructure to scale as traffic grew dramatically. Hired key engineers as Eventbrite grew from 12 to 80+ employees while revenue and traffic grew as well.Eventbrite helps event organizers promote and sell tickets for events online.

New York, Ny, Us

Join as 1st intern in Operations, then 17th full-time employee as Software Engineer, R&D.Worked on 4-person Operations team in 2007 while traffic scaled to ~30M MAU. Learned how to operate high volume websites. Rejoined Digg full-time as Software Engineer, R&D after finishing school, working on the core logic of Digg's promotion algorithm and recommendation systems (Python). Learned about machine learning (tf-idf, minhash/locality sensitive hashing, graph centrality) from experienced PhD co-workers.Digg.com was a pioneering Web 2.0 social site where users shared and discovered interesting news and content through voting.

Co-Founder & CTO. FantasyBook was acquired by Citizen Sports in November 2008, and Citizen Sports was subsequently acquired by Yahoo! Sports. Co-founded with Jon Brelig and funded by Bay Partners.FantasyBook was the first company to build fantasy sports games on the newly-released Facebook app platform. Social versions of fantasy baseball, fantasy football, and fantasy soccer went on to gain over 1M users.

1st generation web analytics platform. Started at IBM SurfAid Analytics, a 50 person startup within IBM. IBM's SurfAid Analytics division was acquired by Coremetrics in April 2006.Worked part-time and full-time during school. Transitioned from Customer Support to Product Management in January 2007. In Customer Support, used Bash/UNIX to diagnose analytics accuracy problems, taught online retail managers how to read web analytics reports, and tracked down problems in the web analytics infrastructure. In Product Management, prototyped new features, maintained the working sales demo application, and developed web analytics tagging tools.Coremetrics is a premium web analytics vendor specializing in online retail.