Ben Werdmuller

As west coast Director of Investments at Matter, a venture capital accelerator for media startups backed by the New York Times, Associated Press, KQED, and PRX, I was responsible for sourcing, evaluating, and investing in startups with the potential to transform media for good. I led the investment strategy, ultimately investing in 24 companies across diverse verticals and mentoring a total portfolio of 73 startups. I provided hands-on guidance on fundraising, technical decision-making, sustainable business models, and building strong team cultures, drawing on my experience as both a successful founder and engineering leader. I co-taught the product design and strategy side of Matter's accelerator program: a 5-month intensive course on venture design thinking for early-stage media startups and innovation teams from our media partners. My students included founders working on audience engagement, revenue diversification, and technology platforms, as well as teams from the New York Times, Associated Press, and other major organizations tackling strategic transformation challenges. I taught human-centered design, rapid prototyping, sustainable business model development, and the frameworks that separate successful media ventures from those that fail.

After Medium acquired Known, I joined as a Senior Engineer on the publications team. I built features supporting major platforms like The Ringer and ThinkProgress while advocating for open web principles within a centralized platform. I developed export tools and custom domain support to give users more control over their content, co-founded an Openness Circle to champion standards like Do Not Track, and facilitated discussions about Medium's editorial approach during the contentious 2016 election.

I co-founded Known, an open source publishing platform for mobile-first communities that prioritized individual content ownership over platform control: an early entry in the movement toward user-owned content on the open web. I conceived and built the software, established the open source community, and secured Matter Ventures funding. Our platform powered communities at KQED, Davidson College, and Harvard University; KQED's implementation won a NAMLE media literacy award. Known was acquired by Medium in 2016, and the open source platform continues to exist today.

As Latakoo's first employee, I served as Chief Technology Officer and helped define the company's vision: enabling TV journalists to transmit video from anywhere with an internet connection, transcoded to their newsroom's specifications. I led all product and technology development, building the core platform from the ground up. I also conceived and developed Latakoo Hub, a co-located enterprise product that became central to the company's profitability. The platform I built empowered journalists to report from extraordinary locations - including Mount Everest, Syria, the Sochi Olympics, and Air Force One - serving major newsrooms including NBC News, Nexstar Media Group, and Spectrum News. I co-authored two patents for the video compression and transfer technology. I remain a member of Latakoo's Board of Directors.

• Designed and constructed a data API for the Edinburgh Festivals, collectively the world's largest arts festival. • Collaborated with disparate arts organizations to address their digital requirements. • Co-hosted a hackathon targeting Scotland's creative sector.

I co-founded Elgg and built one of the first open source white-label social networking platforms designed to serve communities rather than extract from them. I wrote the initial codebase, led technical development, and built an open source community that translated Elgg into over 80 languages and contributed hundreds of developers. The platform empowered diverse communities: Spain's anti-austerity movement used it for organizing, the Australian, Canadian, and Dutch governments deployed it for public sector collaboration, and Ivy League universities, NGOs like Oxfam, and Fortune 500 companies adopted it for their communities. Elgg remains in active use worldwide today. Dave Tosh and I founded Curverider in 2006 to provide commercial services for Elgg. As CTO, I led technical decisions while working with Dave on business strategy. We bootstrapped to profitability: MIT became our first client for the first OpenCourseWare platform, and the University of Brighton partnered with us to launch the world's first campus-wide social network. Our work was covered in the Guardian, ZDNet, and TechCrunch and won InfoWorld's Best in Open Source Software award. We built a hosted platform competing with Ning and created Explode, a semi-distributed network that pioneered concepts now central to federated platforms. After raising venture investment, Curverider was acquired by Thematic Networks in 2010.