Ben Werdmuller

In a world where it’s easy to feel powerless, ProPublica makes people feel like someone is fighting in their corner. That mission is important to me, and from stories about Supreme Court corruption to revelations about Peter Thiel’s oversized Roth savings plan, it’s making a real impact.

It’s a privilege to be a small part of the team; when I heard that ProPublica needed an interim tech lead, I jumped at it.

This was one of those jobs where five or six people sent me the description and said, “this sounds like you.” It did, and I was very excited by the prospect of returning to work alongside journalism — particularly at a time when democracy seemed to be at a critical juncture. Years later, when I was asked what I did in this moment in history, I didn’t want to have to reply that I was sat on the sidelines. The 19th’s inclusive mission spoke directly to my worries.

The 19th has the most intentional, thoughtful culture of any organization I’ve ever worked in. I was delighted to contribute to it, but more than that, I was excited to learn. Like every organization, there was room for growth and improvement, and the conversations around change were always open and participative.

My friend Phil Balliet, who had previous been a member of a Matter-supported founding team, was the Head of Design. He let me know that ForUsAll was looking for a new technical leader. While fintech is not my core interest, I was drawn by ForUsAll’s mission to make retirement savings accessible to people on lower incomes. Although I believe a real social safety net is necessary, in a world where that doesn’t exist, companies like ForUsAll have the potential to make a difference.

Over the three years I was there, I learned a great deal about operating in a well-regulated industry, as well as implementing security practices across an enterprise organization. I’m particularly grateful for ForUsAll’s support when my mother died.

I’d known Julien Genestoux, Unlock’s founder, for years: we traveled in the same open web circles. We’d discussed our previous projects, Known and Superfeedr, with each other, and I’d been surprised when I started at Medium and discovered that Superfeedr had also been acquired. He had subsequently decided that the open web was missing a protocol for membership, and needed a partner on the product side. Matter’s media partners, facing a more uncertain future for journalism, had consolidated their funding. I was, therefore, free to join.

While I was (and remain) a blockchain skeptic, I cared deeply about Unlock’s mission to help every independent creative sustain themselves on the web. Targeted advertising encouraged a surveillance society, and consolidated wealth among a small number of platforms. An open protocol had the potential to empower everyone to control their creative destinies. Julien is inspiring, and his energy is infectious; I thought (and think) that he was more likely than most people to succeed in this mission.

In 2019, my mother faced serious health complications from her lung transplant, and I spent eleven weeks at her side in the hospital. Because of my need to attend to her and stay in California rather than relocate to New York, I left Unlock.

Corey Ford, Matter’s CEO, had previous funded Known as part of its third class. When Known was acquired by Medium, I continued to support the Matter community, taking part in interviews and helping community members whenever I could. I’d secretly daydreamed about joining the team and investing directly in startups — so it was incredibly exciting when Corey asked me to do just that. I was happy at Medium, but Matter was particularly special.

Because of my varied background, mentorship meetings ran the gamut: it wasn’t uncommon for them to start with fundraising advice and then segue into database schema design or software architecture help, all within the same half hour. Many of the people who were involved in Matter — both as founders and colleagues — remain my friends. Helping to run the Matter program, as well as the community around it, changed my life.

It was my first time working at a well-funded startup, or at any organization with over a hundred engineers. It taught me a great deal about team culture in particular: ways to give everyone from engineers and designers to marketers and salespeople the space they needed to be creative and do great work. Medium was particularly thoughtful about creating a more equitable environment, having tried and moved on from holocracy, and went so far as to open source its hiring process. I’ve carried elements of Medium’s culture into every subsequent job I’ve held.

I started writing the platform that would become Known as my mother recovered from a double-lung transplant. When it became clear that she had a terminal illness, I moved to the US to be closer to her. The transplant prolonged her life, but she remarked that there was no community platform where she felt safe discussing her experiences. Known was originally built in 2013 to be a self-hosted, private community platform for her. It also helped me answer the question: if I’d built Elgg in a world with iPhones and ubiquitous broadband, what would it have looked like?

I began to collaborate with Erin Richey on its design. She suggested that we turn it into a startup and pitch it to Matter, an accelerator for media startups. We were accepted and became part of the third cohort. We also shifted its focus from community platforms to becoming an indieweb publishing platform that allowed people to own their own social spaces on the web. Kevin Marks joined us as advisor, helping to guide us in myriad ways.

The open source platform continues to exist today, but the startup was acquired by Medium, which allowed me to repay Matter’s investment.

I met the founders of Latakoo at a talk I gave at the Kennedy School of Government in 2009. Seeing some emerging issues with the journalism industry in America, and in particular in their home state of Texas, they were hoping to create a new model for local journalism. I agreed to help them.

On the way, we discovered that TV news crews were being sent out into the field with digital HD cameras, but had no efficient way to get that footage back to the newsroom. They were often using 3G cards to FTP uncompressed footage, which took many hours. We realized we could use a combination of existing compression techniques and a simple user experience in order to reduce the transmission time to minutes. It worked — and was faster than solutions that were orders of magnitude more expensive. They named the product Latakoo and began to sell it to local newsrooms around the country.

In particular, it became clear to the MBA students that I knew a lot about the web and startups, and I began to serve as an unofficial resource to them. I also attended Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford seminars with leading names in the tech industry, like Craig Newmark, Marc Benioff, Ev Williams, and Biz Stone (the latter of whom joined my startup as an advisor).

Dave Tosh and I shared a tiny office at the Moray House School of Education. He was studying for a PhD in e-learning; I was working as an EdTech developer. We both agreed that existing learning technology platforms didn’t actually help anyone learn — and because I’d been blogging since 1998 and building web systems since 1995, I knew that people were learning from each other all over the web.

We wrote a paper that described how reflective blogging could form the foundation of a more useful learning technology platform, which was widely read. Someone fatefully commented: “it’s one thing to write about it; it’s another thing to build it”. So we did.

Dave and I both built prototypes. I built mine in PHP and put it on a domain name I used for my email, which related to Elgg, the town in Switzerland my Dad’s family is from. Dave wrote one in ColdFusion. In the end, we developed mine further, and tried to give it to the university. When they declined to pick it up (letting us know in strong terms that social platforms had no place in education), I quit my job and started to develop it full-time on my own.

I was originally hired to build and support the Coaches Info Service, a site run by the International Society of Biomechanics in Sports and the University of Edinburgh in order to help make sports biomechanics accessible to professional coaches. I built a new CMS that incorporated precise sports science videos which could be iterated frame by frame as well as played conventionally.

I was also involved in the promotion of the Center for Aquatic Research and Education, which included a high tech swimming pool that included a battery of cameras and a variable depth floor that could be used for sports research and training.

I moved on to support the wider Media and Learning Technology Service, where I worked on a variety of tools that supported the campus learning management system. This is where I learned about the EdTech industry, learning management systems, and their underlying technologies and business dynamics. It’s also where I met Dave Tosh, who I shared a tiny office with. I would go on to co-found my first startup with him.

Daily Information is an information sheet in my hometown of Oxford, England that has been published since the 1960s. Its proprietor, John Rose, was a local legend.

He originally hired me — as an after-school job — to run the Bulletin Board System. Anyone in Oxford could dial in and read the entertainment listings or the classified ads.

In 1995, I learned HTML in order to create Daily Information’s first website, which was one of the first – possibly the first – classified ads websites, pre-dating even Craigslist. Over the years to come, I would revamp the website many times, and continue to offer support to the team as a consultant. I last worked with them in 2009.