Ben T. Smith, Iv Email & Phone Number

Fairhope, Al, Us

Fairhope, Al, Us

Chicago, Illinois, Us

After leaving the 98 year old strategy and operations firm as a partner over 20 years ago, Ben was asked to return to support the firm's growth in digital, media, telecommunications, and high technology. Ben's work includes advising the firm's large clients and their boards and the firm's senior partners and board on strategy, restructuring, acquisitions, investment, and digital transformation across industries from transportation, industrials, communications, media, technology, and retail.Ben leads the firm’s venture capital relationships and created Kearney Venture Capital Fund with Cendana Capital and led multiple acquisitions including Silicon Foundry for the firm. Ben leads the firm Global Kearney Digital and Analytics Practice and formerly ran Kearney’s high growth Communications, Media, and Technology practice for the America’s, is on the Managing Partner operating committee and is a board member of the firm. As a board member and member of the finance and audit committee of the firm, he drove the change in capital structure of the firm to support the significant growth and improvement of financial performance of the firm over the past 5 years.

Advise founder and managing partner of a $1B+ fund of funds for seed and early stage venture funds and direct investments.

Fund made up of current and former senior partners from consulting partnerships that invest in early stage companies along side of top tier venture funds. Some deals include Trovix (Acquired by Monster),Trigo (Acquired by IBM), and Metreo (Acquired by STG), In spite of being a 2001 vintage fund, the fund is returned well.

Denver, Co, Us

Advise leadership of global apparel company on ventures and innovation.

San Jose, Ca, Us

Helping to early social networking company I founded to drive company to new growth working with the Board and CEO while representing the founding common shareholders and a group of investors to grow the largest organically growing database of business people and competitive analysis of companies and industries

Work with Managing Partner on portfolio development and deal origination and execution.Accelerator Ventures is a San Francisco-based venture capital firm that invests in early stage technology companies. Accelerator Ventures works with talented entrepreneurs to create the next generation of great companies. Early stage investments ranging from consumer, enterprise software, financial services and infrastructure.

San Francisco, Ca, Us

The premier public mobile gaming company. Joined the board originally with new CEO to help reposition the company to the freemium model, original IP and smart phone revenue.Ben has chaired the compensation committee, served as chairman, is on currently on the compensation, governance, audit and strategy committees and is the lead outside director. The company owns leading games including Covet, Design Home, Kim Kardashian Hollywood, Gun Brothers, Deer Hunter, Contract Killer, Diner Dash, Tap Sports Baseball.Ben joined the board in a turnaround at under $1 a share and worked with the company until its sale to EA for $12.50 a share.

Consulting and investment partnership that advises technology and media companies on strategy finance, marketing, and acquisitions. Firm has advised large media and technology companies on over $2B in investments and acquisitions.Serve on a few private company boards as part of this firm and have invested in companies like Mesmo (sold to Game Show Network), Tapulous (Sold to Disney), Trovix (sold to Monster) Well.io, IndexTank (Sold to LinkedIn), SocialWire (Rakuten), Choicepass(Sold to SFDC),Docstoc (Intuit), QP Park, LongTailVideo, Roqbot, Stik, TubularLabs, Influitive, StudySoup, Rinse, MyTime, Talkable, FitBit, Dropcam, Rockbot, and others..Investor in or advisor to numerous venture funds, including DCM, MDV, Softech, Accelerator Ventures, PivotNorth, Freestyle, GGV, Uncork, Precusor, Mango,and Cendana

Los Gatos, Ca, Us

A new media shopping company focused on local discovery shopping across the web, mobile, tablets, and social. The FindnSave app has been downloaded millions of times, is a consistent 5 star app on Apple and Android and has driven significant trackable purchases in retail outlets.Backed by $50MM investment from 12 major newspaper and media companies including Advance Digital, A. H. Belo Corporation, Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., Cox Media Group, The E. W. Scripps Company, Gannett Co., Inc., GateHouse Media, Inc., Hearst Corporation, Lee Enterprises, MediaNews Group, The McClatchy Company, and The Washington Post Company.Wanderful Media owns a series of properties and assets focused on bringing better shopping solutions to the more than 80% of US markets that it serves across mobile, the web, tablets, and social platforms. After putting a new team together including a number of people from MerchantCircle and Borland, re-envisioning the strategic direction, and driving the financing; the audience has grown by 4000% and its iPad and iPhone apps have consistently ranked in the top 5 of their category and top 100 across the AppStore. Over 90% of Wanderful Media audience is on mobile apps, including FindnSave and CoffeeTable.Company sold to another newspaper holding group.

Walnut Creek, Ca, Us

Lead all consumer media mobile and internet properties across Reply! including MerchantCircle.com, Bloglines.com, Contractors.com, iMotors.com, and TimeBridge.com which represents 10's of millions of organic consumer users per month and millions of small local merchants.Reply! acquired the company that I founded, MerchantCircle in 2011 for $60MM and a significant return to investors and team.

San Ramon, Ca, Us

Bringing the Local Internet to Millions of Local Businesses.MerchantCircle connects the local business community with the Local Internet, helping merchants understand and use our Internet tools and buy online and offline advertisingBen co founded the company which has served over 2MM local merchants and 25MM monthly unique consumers; and has achieved profitability, 3 years of over 60% annual growth and 90% gross margins. He drove the sale of the company in 2011 for $60MM and great return for his investors and team along side of addition future returns from the buyers filed IPO.The company was backed by Scale Ventures, Rustic Canyon Partners, IAC, and Steamboat Ventures and owned MerchantCircle.com, Bloglines.com, and Timebridge.com

One of the first iPhone application network sold to Disney is 2010 and the maker of one of the top 5 most used games on the iPhone platform. One of the first investors, helped lead the board and advise the CEO to an incredible return in 18 months.

As an Executive in Residence at Rustic Canyon, Ben is focused on helping to finance and create companies in the new media and next generation software areas.

Newbury, Berkshire, Gb

CEO of an newly formed business being separated from Borland Software. (Sold to Embarcadero)CodeGear is the leading organization globally for innovating tools for software developers. Drove the carve out of business from Borland and the creation of new organization, reinvigorated leadership team, launch of CodeGear brand, and the creation of 3 new products including the first new langauge platforms in years (Ruby and PHP). Continued as Advisor to the company once permanent CEO was put in place.

Newbury, Berkshire, Gb

Advised 3 CEO's on acquisition strategy and execution and then managed Corporate Development during repositioning of company. Built out corporate development team to support strategy. Drove 3 acquisition transactions over 9 months worth over $150M along side of a couple of investments. Acquistions included Legadero, Gauntlet, and Segue. Legadero positioned Borland in the portfolio management space.Gauntlet became the center piece of the Open ALM positioning for Borland. Segue helped drive ALM growth well over to well over 50% YTY growth and repositioned Borland.Drove sell off process of a $75MM business. Restructured business during the process.

San Jose, Ca, Us

After telling the "real" founder this was a "goofy" idea when he brought me something that turned into Spoke in 2002, I bumped into some interesting science and decided with a focus on sales processes there was a tremendous opportunity to build a business. Drove Spoke as the founding CEO since 2002 with a focus on privacy, users control of their data, and enterprise value from day one.Have driven the company from the white board to a complete management team, to 15 patents (a few with my name on them), through raising $21M in progressively higher valuations, to its first enterprise customers including some of the largest salesforces in the world and to over 50 Team edition customers.In a difficult move, created and drove the strategy to switch to a higher velocity sales model and pure web delivery. As part of this, the team created partnerships with Siebel On Demand and Salesforce.comCo inventor on some of the key social networking patents that Spoke owns. Remain on the board of Spoke.

Washington, Dc, Us

On leave from EDS, worked with incredible team of long term civil service executives and recruited other senior executives who also took a leave from the private sector, to help establish the response to 9-11. This included helping to stand up the Transportation Security Administration from employee 1 to an organization of 10's of thousands and leading the initial investigations into a number of valuable technology programs and the deployment of over $10B of technology. Recognized by the Office of the Secretary of Transportation for the leadership that I showed.

West Hartford, Us

Founding member of team to get A.T. Kearney and then EDS into Venture investment activity and partnering with early stage software and hardware companies. Led the formation of new relationships with the venture community for EDS and helped EDS form a number of new businesses. Wrote publicly about future of webservices, storage, and enterprise applications. Talked EDS out of some of the great bad investments of the bubble, but not all of them. Lead the formation of a go to market alliance with Sun, Webmethods and a set of 5 emerging software companies. 3 of these 5 are now the leaders in their categories with 2 having very strong financial exits.

Chicago, Illinois, Us

One of the founding members of the team who established the High Technology efforts at A.T. Kearney which became one of the most vibrant practices at the firm. After being named the one of youngest partners in A.T. Kearney history, I was named one of the 25 most influential consultants in 2002 for my work with clients. Conducted strategy, M&A, marketing, and operations work with leading clients around the world including HP, Sony, Union Pacific, Samsung, Delphi, Ford, EDS, Intel, TI, LG, Lucent, FedEx, and others. Defined new sales methodology and organization approach at a number of large technology companies. Worked with leading companies on thier approach to alliances and investment activities.

Stepped into run an EDS investment in b2b arena. Created positioning that drove company to be on the Upside 100 list and Forrester leader lists. Managed transaction with another private company after crash of 2000. In addition to many important things, was the guy who called the liquidators to buy unopened Sun servers and 4 week old furniture. Met the first investor in Spoke when he passed on Casbah 4 times.

Omaha, Ne, Us

As part of a transition team supporting the respositioning of the company, I stepped in to run sales and marketing of a $150M transporation company owned by Union Pacific, which grew to $186M by the time a transaction was done. This included a complete remake of the sales team into a technology solutions focused team and a new account focus.A key piece of this repositioning was the creation of an internet based tranportation management solution that two other great people had put together at the company. These 2 people ended up being key leaders in a company Arzoon that I was an investor in.A number of the people I met became close friends including people that I later invested in and with and one of the people who asked me to serve the White House a few years later.

London, Gb

Worked on numerous interesting clients like HP, Apple, Samsung, Lockheed. Key member of team for the first large scale reengineering project in Korea. Began to invest aggressively in relationships, including one of people who was one of the first customers for Spoke

A gator hunter, a clerk in a pharmacy, a cook at fast food place, scooped ice cream, washed cars at a gas station, scored credit apps for Providian,washed and changed tires on semi trucks, CAD design for grocery store contactor, got robbed at an AM/PM, designed robot parts for Caltrans RoboDot, designed tools for IBM disk drives, did M&A and Supplier restructuring for a disk drive company....

Msia/Mba, Strategy, Technology

Bsme, Mechanical Engineering

Education record

Education record