Ben is the ideal tech leader if you’re looking to get something off the ground. He takes the time to use the product and truly understand the user’s motivation, allowing him to intuitively know where to cut corners for speed and where such shortcuts would come back to haunt us. I was amazed by how effortlessly Ben could shift from tackling a complex infrastructure spike to resolving multiple smaller issues within a matter of hours.
Chase Croft
Head of Product
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Collabs
Long-term partners across fintech, hospitality, commerce, and developer tooling. I drop into teams as a builder-advisor so launches stick and people aren't burned out doing it.
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Side quests
Currently shipping
AI-guided matchmaking with real human coaches who plan the dates, gather feedback, and help intentional daters find their person without swipe fatigue.
Concierge matchmakers with 10+ years’ experience plus AI scoring after every date.
Image-to-API mock backend that turns screenshots into live endpoints so front-end teams can ship demos, QA flows, and workshops without waiting on backend tickets.
Image-to-API turns designs into live endpoints so demos and QA stay unblocked.
Turns any article or landing page into 30 days of LinkedIn-ready posts in under a minute, complete with refreshed hooks, hashtags, and scheduling exports.
Paste a URL, get a month of LinkedIn posts with hooks, hashtags, and CSV exports.
Retired experiments
Occasional field notes on product, engineering, and operating with a measured tempo.
I've been CTO at two early-stage startups and spent 15 years shipping products for companies like Clerk, GoDaddy, Cisco, and Soho House. Here's how I typically work with teams.
I embed with your team 2-3 days a week. I do the architecture, write code, unblock engineers, and own the technical direction - without the full-time hire.
Best for: Early-stage startups who need senior technical leadership but aren't ready for a full-time CTO.
WorkMade (2023-2024): Partnered with the founder on roadmap while designing the categorisation engine that keeps users' financial data secure for tax filings.
Letter (2019-2023): Architected and built the platform the business runs on today, guiding the engineering team and working with the CEO on what to launch next.
Sometimes you don't need ongoing help - you need someone to come in, fix something specific, and hand it off clean. I do focused 2-4 week sprints on architecture overhauls, MVP builds, or technical debt cleanup.
Best for: Teams with a specific problem and a deadline.
Clerk Commerce: Built key parts of the billing backend in Go - plans, subscriptions, proration logic, and developer-facing APIs.
mytheresa: Architected and shipped a React Native e-commerce app, training the team to maintain it after handoff.
A few hours a month for founders or first-time CTOs who need a technical sounding board. Weekly or bi-weekly calls, async access for quick questions, architecture and hiring gut-checks.
Best for: Non-technical founders or new CTOs who need someone in their corner.
Architecture decisions and gut-checks before you commit to a direction
Hiring - evaluating candidates, structuring interviews, onboarding plans
Managing up to founders or boards when you need to translate technical trade-offs
Chaos theory, fault tolerance, and why Jurassic Park taught us more about distributed systems than we expected.
Ben was an exceptional CTO and a true partner in the chaos of startup life. At WorkMade, we took on massive projects with ambitious timelines, and Ben had the rare ability to turn an idea from concept yesterday to a working build in production today. He knew exactly where to focus our energy for the biggest impact, operated with incredible agility, and made thoughtful trade-offs without ever compromising quality and security. Without needing to be asked. Beyond his technical skill, Ben was an incredible teammate and communicator. He knew how to adapt his style to whoever he was working with (whether it was breaking things down for a non-technical teammate or deep-diving with an engineer) so everyone felt aligned and heard. Working with Ben felt like having both a strategic visionary and a hands-on builder in one. Any founder/team would be lucky to have him in their corner.
Nick Simpson
Founder, WorkMade
Ben is a fantastic engineer, CTO, and manager. I had the privilege of working as an engineer with Ben for six months and learned an incredible amount. Ben has a keen mind for evaluating and making responsible eng tradeoffs to balance speed with stability and reliability which is invaluable in a startup environment. He also is a very efficient engineer and consistently shipped quality code quickly. During his time at WorkMade, Ben was responsible for spearheading several efforts to make our monitoring and deployment infrastructure more robust while simultaneously writing code to ship new features. As a manager Ben does a great job of mentoring his reports and making time to work with them to answer questions, explain things, and generally improve their skills, but also provide them enough time and space to figure things out on their own. It was a real pleasure to get to work with him and he would be an invaluable member to any eng team.
Anya Hargil
Engineer, WorkMade
At Mytheresa Ben was paramount in crafting the architectural foundations of a React Native application, while also training and guiding the other engineers. He is a stellar developer, but in my eyes his collaborative and thorough approach make him a real stand-out.
Phillip Barthold
mytheresa
Ben was able to apply his front-end development and architecture experience from day one, helping us come up with and validate key architecture choices and avoid costly mistakes as we scale Kayako to be used by 10,000s organisations worldwide to support millions of end users. We found Ben's advice to be realistic and pragmatic, factoring in resource constraints, business needs of the day and balancing those with future scalability benefits. We are relieved to have had Ben part of our design process - his early contributions have saved a potentially limitless amount of developer time, pain and costs down the line.
Jamie Edwards
CEO, Kayako
I hired Ben to lead the redevelopment of our SaaS application from crusty old code into something more modern. He made suggestions - along with pro's and con's - that helped us decide which way to go. We ultimately went with his recommendations. I quickly came to depend on Ben's knowledge and expertise on all aspects of the development of our Backbone.js app. His wider experience with other aspects of product architecture, such as REST APIs and CSS was also invaluable. Unlike your stereotypical uber-techie, he's also very personable and everyone enjoyed working with him. I've come to regard him as the foremost expert in his field.
Duane Jackson
Founder, KashFlow
We worked with Ben on a tricky React-based medical app, where we needed to cover a lot of ground efficiently, with a small team. Ben was a pleasure to work with - fast, effective and a great communicator, delivering on time and delivering exactly as promised. Particularly valuable was his ability to help us implement best practices, sensible technical architecture and a testing framework that helped ensure that code quality remained high even after his involvement on the project ended and the codebase transitioned to being owned and maintained by another team. Wouldn't hesitate to recommend him to others looking for the same!
Jon Lay
Founder, Hanno
Ben built us responsive front-end framework that minimised maintenance and increased developer efficiency. He was able to quickly understand our needs and provide us with the building blocks we needed to scale our front-end.
Tom Alterman
Product Manager
Organising and running ng-workshop with Ben was a great experience. He is an excellent teacher and more than willing to share his knowledge building and scaling web applications. He covered everything from basic JavaScript concepts to high-level architecture and best practices, and made sure everyone is at the same level by the end of the day. We received very positive feedback from all attendees after the event. I don't think the workshop would have been such a success without Ben.
Svilen Gospodinov
ng-workshop co-organizer
Ben's Javascript for Beginners workshop was extremely useful. He covered the fundamentals of Javascript in one day and I've come out of it with the knowledge and confidence to write pure Javascript when I code. The workshop was in a small group, so it was easy to chat, and he is very approachable which meant I wasn't afraid to ask questions. The topics were interactive and dynamic and definitely grows your appetite to code and learn more. I'd recommend this workshop for anyone stuck in learning JavaScript.
Pui-Ling Lau
Workshop attendee
Next conversation
Async-friendly collaboration for founders and teams that need a steady hand on architecture, delivery, and the people shipping it. Reach out and we’ll map the quickest path to traction.
Send over context on your stack, current constraints, or simply a calendar link. I typically reply within one working day with next steps or time slots.
Email BenPrefer a DM? I keep GitHub and LinkedIn current with talks, code, and notes from the field.
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