meBen Newhouse
I'm a recovering entrepreneur, engineer, product leader and engineering manager. Currently taking a while off to figure out where to focus the next decade and to nurture relationships I've neglected in the decade past.
You can find me on the internet on various places, including medium, github, hacker news, twitter, and facebook. I also angel invest and advise various startups.
DropboxDropbox
I originally joined Dropbox to bring the Bubbli experience to Carousel but was quickly attracted to Dropbox's core Sync product and what came next. During my first hack week I created Project Infinite. After much campaigning, I built up a team around it and productized it as Smart Sync. Individual users of Smart Sync pay double the monthly price of the base Dropbox product and retain at the highest level across all cohorts of Dropbox users.
Having fallen in love with management, I then went on to consolidate all of our core sync teams across the stack (for the first time!) into a unified Sync organization. I lead this team to make the investments needed for the next ten years of Dropbox's life. I stayed in this role as Head of Sync through Dropbox's IPO after which I set out for new pastures.
bubbliBubbli
I started bubbli in 2010 with Terrence McArdle, wherein we combined his background in spherical photography with my background in augmented reality to create bubbles (see below).
We raised $2m from August Capital in 2011, spoke at TED and then released an app to the public two years later in 2013.Bubbli was acquired by Dropbox in April 2014
yelpYelp
I originally started at Yelp as an intern on the search team in 2009, but in a series of strange events ended up creating Yelp Monocle for iPhone and Android, arguably the most popular augmented reality implementation in the world and something that boosted Yelp's mobile metrics 50% across the board at the time. Five years later people are still tweeting about it! I continued to work at Yelp throughout my senior year of undergrad but left just as I graduated to start bubbli.
stanfordStanford
I knew I belonged in Silicon Valley and was lucky enough, despite by rather normal grades, to be accepted to Stanford as part of the class of 2010. I followed the footsteps of the previous two generations of my family in studying Electrical Engineering (specializing in analog circuits and devices), something which I hope to actually use in my real life some day. During my time at Stanford I studied abroad in Beijing (at 北大), danced with and directed Swingtime, and dilly dallied my senior year taking random CS classes because I had somehow managed to finish my EE degree in three years. As I created Yelp Monocle my junior summer, one of my favorite memories was being asked back to give a guest lecture at Stanford before I had even graduated.
taiwanTaiwan
I was too young to go to college when I graduated from high school in 2005 and so the obvious next choice was to go abroad! I figured I could go to Europe and learn a romance language relatively quickly or go to Asia and struggle to learn Chinese for the rest of my life, I chose to pursue the latter through the Rotary Youth Exchange Program. Taipei remains one of my favorite places on the planet and I consider my year abroad as the best year of my life so far, not to mention a very formitive one.
(I'm a little sleep deprived).