Hi, I'm Ben

Life

I narrowly missed being born in North Carolina, where most of my family lives, and instead grew up in Atlanta with a sister named Rachel. After a lifetime as an overprivileged and under-aware prep star at Pace Academy, I went to Vanderbilt University, where I did Economics, Chinese, Frisbee, and other general shenanigans. For a semester, I lived in Beijing. After school, I moved to New York to take my first job at Yelp. Later I moved to Phoenix, still with Yelp. Then back to NYC for a new job and with my girlfriend (now wife) Janice, with whom I now reside contentedly in South Williamsburg, on the East River.

Fun facts

  • never owned an iPhone
  • used to speak pretty good Mandarin Chinese
  • lives in Brooklyn, rides a fixed gear bicycle, and so what
  • can’t understand why anyone likes baseball
  • proficient with banjos
  • been to Disneyland (three times), not Disneyworld
  • had a college radio show and played this song weirdly often
  • random celebrity sighting:

Work

In reverse order, I’ve worked at:

  • SeatGeek, as VP of Customer Retention (current)
  • Buddy Media (now part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud), as a Business Intelligence Analyst
  • Clover, as a Sales Operations Manager
  • Yelp, as a CRM Administrator

And although these jobs didn’t make my résumé (pdf) or my LinkedIn profile, I have also at various times earned a living as:

  • a dog walker
  • a grocery bagger
  • a Methodist wedding acolyte

Pictures

Sometimes I go places and take photos. Here are some:

This Site

I made this website. You can fork it, star it, or just plain poke around it on GitHub. Here are some of the things that I used: