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.

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.

For the last few years, I've led technology in newsrooms serving the public interest. Right now, I'm Senior Director of Technology at ProPublica, where I lead product engineering, enterprise technology, and security for a Pulitzer Prize-winning organization that investigates abuses of power in the public interest. Before that, I was Chief Technology Officer at The 19th, which reports at the intersection of gender, politics, and power.

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.

I also 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.

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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