ForUsAll aims to give everybody a stronger financial future- particularly people who have been underserved.

As Head of Engineering, I led and grew the team that built our product. I hired, set policy, participated in product strategy, and worked with all levels of the company. I saw my main role as creating the conditions for our engineers to do their best work - and building the most diverse and inclusive engineering team I could, in service of our mission.

Unlock is a decentralized protocol for membership that allows creators to make money from their work on the web on their own terms. Anyone can add Unlock's open source technology to their website in order to monetize in just a few minutes.

● Helped to build cross-disciplinary product development team for blockchain-based payments product
● Built human-centered design fundamentals into company culture
● Steered initial launch of payments product for independent publishers
● Worked directly on Node / React codebase

Matter invested in early stage, for-profit ventures with the potential to make society more informed, inclusive, and empathetic. Its partners included organizations like Google, the Knight Foundation, the New York Times and the Associated Press. Its in-person, five-month accelerator program anchored founders in user-centered design thinking, setting them up for success through rigorous testing and prototyping. Half of its Fund II CEOs are women, and its portfolio companies have been acquired by Buzzfeed, Kickstarter, Snap, Change.org, and Medium.

● Determined and executed investment strategy
● Invested in 24 startups across multiple verticals, while supported a total portfolio of 73
● Instructed and mentored startups and media institutions in venture design thinking and product strategy
● Directly liaised with Limited Partners including McClatchy, KQED, the New York Times, and the Associated Press
● Built a pipeline of investment deal flow in the San Francisco office, collaborating ac

Medium is a high-profile network for sharing writing and ideas, founded by Evan Williams, who previously helped start Blogger and Twitter. Users range from individual artists and writers to the President of the United States. I worked on the publications team, supporting brands like The Ringer, ThinkProgress, and MLB.

● Worked on publications team, providing platform for leading publications like The Ringer and Think Progress
● Co-founded the Openness circle, helping Medium to export data, adhere to web standards, and provide market-leading compliance with privacy protections like Do Not Track
● Co-led strategy sessions around responses to 2016 election

Known is an open source community platform that works with your existing domain, website, and branding. I co-founded the platform with Erin Richey, attracted funding from Matter Ventures, architected the software, and was its founding CEO.

● Devised and built open source, web-based community platform
● Grew open source community to 50+ contributors
● Raised funding from Matter Ventures and participated in its third accelerator class
● Sold to enterprise customers including KQED, Davidson College, the University of Leeds, and Harvard University
● Participated in W3C Social Web Working Group as invited expert
● Designed site for KQED which won National Association for Media Literacy award

I met the founders of Latakoo after giving a talk at Harvard's Kennedy School, and loved their mission to empower local news to gather and send video faster. Latakoo empowers news teams like NBC News to gather news video from the field - including locations like Syria, Mount Everest, and Air Force One - using any Internet connection.

● Designed and built platform to quickly send video footage in any format back to TV newsrooms over any internet connection, arriving in the format of the newsroom’s choice for editing and broadcast
● Helped sell product to over 200 NBC News stations and over 170 Nexstar Media Group stations
● Supported journalists in transferring video from locations including Syria, Mount Everest, and Air Force One
● Participated in fundraising, helping to raise over $2M in capital
● Grew and led distributed product development team
● Conceived, wrote, and was awarded patent: Compressing, transcoding, sending, and retrieving video and audio files in a server-based syste

● Co-ordinated site redesign, development, and roll-out of Content Management System
● Participated in workshops with industry leaders like Ev Williams and Craig Newmark
● Designed marketing materials for use across the School
● Supported MBA students on startup-related topics

The Edinburgh Festivals are, collectively, the largest arts festival in the world. The Innovation Lab was an experiment and resource for the twelve Edinburgh festivals to explore how they can use digital technology to create new value for audiences, artists, the city and themselves.

● Designed and built data API for the world’s largest arts festival
● Worked with arts organizations in order to support digital needs of each organization participating in the festivals
● Co-hosted hackathon for creative sector in Scotland

Elgg is an open source web platform that allows anyone to build their own social networking site.

● Designed and built open source white label social networking platform
● Founded startup company, bootstrapped it to profitability, and subsequently attracted investment
● Grew open source community to hundreds of contributors and over 80 languages
● Presented at venues including Stanford University, Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, the University of Southern Denmark, the University of Barcelona, the ALT-C educational technology conference, the University of Cambridge, and events across Silicon Valley
● Powered networks for the Australian, Dutch, and Canadian governments; was used by Oxfam to train aid workers; was used as an internal intranet by Fortune 500 companies like Hill & Knowlton
● Finalist for the New Statesman New Media Awards in 2007
● Won InfoWorld award for best social networking platform in 2008

Ben Werdmuller

CTO at The 19th; previously co-founded Elgg and Known, invested at Matter Ventures, and worked at Medium.