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About Ben Werdmuller

I'm a technology leader, founder, and investor who builds teams and products for organizations that want to make the world more informed and equal.

I've spent over twenty years doing this across journalism, media, fintech, and open source, as a CTO, a CEO, and a venture investor. I've built platforms used by governments, universities, Fortune 500 companies, and social movements. I've led small, scrappy technology teams, and bigger, venture-scale teams. Across everything I've done, the through-line has been my belief that technology should serve communities rather than extract from them.

Right now, I'm Senior Director of Technology at ProPublica, where I lead product engineering, enterprise technology, and security for a Pulitzer Prize-winning newsroom. My teams build tools that serve both journalists and millions of readers. We've built encrypted sourcing tools, restructured the technology organization, and established ProPublica's AI strategy, proving that newsrooms can adopt new tools without compromising privacy or editorial integrity.

At Matter Ventures, I invested in 24 early-stage media startups and mentored a portfolio of 73 companies as the San Francisco-based Director of Investments. I co-taught the accelerator's five-month course on venture design thinking for startup teams and innovation teams from the New York Times, the Associated Press, and other major media organizations.

At ForUsAll, I built and led a 22-person engineering team. I ran the security program from the ground up, took the company through SOC 2 certification, and designed the secure architecture that enabled a major business pivot – all in a highly-regulated environment.

I co-founded Known, an open source publishing platform that prioritized individual content ownership over platform lock-in. We built communities at Harvard, KQED, and Davidson College; KQED's implementation won a NAMLE media literacy award. When Known was acquired, I joined the team at Medium in 2016 as a Senior Engineer on the publications team, building features for platforms like The Ringer and ThinkProgress while advocating for open web principles from the inside.

Before Known, I was the first employee and CTO at Latakoo, where I built a platform that let TV journalists transmit video from anywhere with an internet connection. Journalists used it to report from Mount Everest, Syria, the Sochi Olympics, and Air Force One, serving newsrooms including NBC News, Nexstar, and Spectrum News. I co-authored two patents for the video compression and transfer technology.

I built Elgg, one of the first open source social networking platforms, from scratch with no external funding. We bootstrapped to profitability: MIT was our first client, and the University of Brighton partnered with us to launch the world's first campus-wide social network. Elgg was translated into 80 languages and adopted by governments, NGOs like Oxfam, Fortune 500 companies, and movements like Spain's anti-austerity protests. Curverider, the company we built around it, was acquired by Thematic Networks in 2010.

I care about the open web. I've spent my career building alternatives to extractive platforms, from Elgg to Known to my work today. I'm an active participant in the open social web movement and a board member of A New Social. I think technology works best when it's open, values-aligned, and accountable to the people who use it.

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