Ben Cherian Email and Phone Number

Working on a startup in the data automation space with Christopher MacGown. More info to follow

I really enjoy advising and mentoring startups. Started mentoring with TechStars NYC, then added TechStars Blockchain and Lift Labs (NBC Universal / Comcast / TechStars).

I actively mentor and advise startups in the Alchemist Accelerator. What drew me to Alchemist was its focus on Enterprise B2B startups since that's where I have the most experience.

I've invested in 40+ idea/pre-seed/seed investments with average check sizes around $25-50K.If you're trying to pitch me, please try and get a warm intro. I probably know someone you do.

Founded in 2010, the Atlanta Music Project provides intensive, tuition-free music education for underserved youth right in their neighborhood.I've been lucky to be associated with them since the beginning and hope to continue helping in any way I can.

Inktank (the company behind Ceph) was purchased by Red Hat for $175M in May 2014. Red Hat was acquired by IBM for $34B in July 2019.At Red Hat, I'm responsible for the business go-to-marketing activities with Ceph, Gluster, hyperconverged products, Container Native Storage, and Red Hat Storage One for all partners. My role involves managing a team that builds and nurtures partnerships, strategic alliances, and channel relationships to bring concrete value to the storage business unit.

Inktank® is transforming storage through the enterprise-wide adoption of Ceph®, the massively scalable, open source, software-defined storage system. Inktank offers Inktank Ceph Enterprise™, the first enterprise-grade, dedicated Ceph product for confidently running a production Ceph storage cluster at scale, as well as best-in-class professional services and Ceph training.As the VP of Strategic Development, I'm responsible for:- Partnerships- Strategic Alliances- Corporate Development

Midokura is a network virtualization global startup, whose market is cloud hosting companies and enterprises that are building public and private clouds. In this role, I:- Acted as the US face and executive presence for a Japan based company with engineers in Japan, the US, and Barcelona- Was responsible for sales, partnerships, marketing, public relations, analyst relations, and helping the exec team think through the overall strategy of Midokura and the MidoNet product- Established relationships with integration partners such as Red Hat, Canonical, Suse, Intel, Citrix as well as 15 other major companies- Ran the US fundraising roadshow involving all of Sand Hill Rd’s elite firms. Involved, along with the rest of the executive team, in raising $17.2M from the sovereign VC fund of Japan (INCJ) as lead investor.

DreamHost is one of the largest independent hosting companies with product lines that include shared hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated server hosting, and most recently cloud hosting. In my role, I:- Established and ran the Emerging Technologies business unit that was responsible for creating DreamHost’s cloud and putting business structure around the Ceph project- Wrote the business plan, marketing plan and financial budget for the Emerging Technologies unit- Developed product definitions for the DreamHost Object product, the DreamHost Compute product, and the Ceph Support service- Evaluated multiple cloud platforms (OpenStack, MorphLabs, Parallels, Canonical UEC, and Cloud.com) and chose OpenStack as the platform to be the core of DreamHost’s cloud- Evangelized Ceph and nurtured relationships with many industry leaders such as Dell, OpenStack, Novell/Suse, Canonical/Ubuntu, Cloudera and Intel- Served as the interim VP of Software Development for a quarter, while we were in-between executives. While in that capacity, I restructured the dev team into product-specific roles and implemented the Scrum methodology

ServiceCloud is a cloud-focused managed services company whose primary customer base was developers and startups. In my role, I:- Created the business plan, technology plan, operations plan, sales/marketing plan, and the financial plan- Managed P&L, including technical operations, sales operations, and business development efforts- Developed and managed complex cloud computing implementations for many Web 2.0 startups, including a video sharing site, a widget platform, and an enterprise micro blogging startup- Established partnerships and technical relationships with leading cloud computing and virtualization vendors such as VMWare, Citrix XenSource, Amazon Web Services, RackSpace, GoGrid and RightScale