Apr 2022 – Dec 2023 · 1 yr 8 mos · New York, New York, United States · On-site

• After several years of weak technical leadership, the Board Of Directors hired me to offer an objective analysis. I documented many structural flaws in the software. The Board Of Directors used my report to justify a reorganization of the company: they fired the CTO and COO and began a process of rebuilding. I took over the tech team. I redesigned the database schema to meet the real needs of the customers (the old database was full of accidental denormalization and incoherent caching). I hired new software developers to build a new API to help wrap the database and give us the separation of concerns that we needed. We moved away from an old PHP monolith and toward a Service Oriented Architecture with the major pieces written in Java, on the backend, and React/Typescript, using the NextJS framework, on the frontend. I also worked with the customer service team to clean up our use of Hubspot. Futurestay is now reinventing its reputation in the marketplace.

Mar 2021 – Apr 2022 · 1 yr 1 mo · New York, New York, United States · On-site

• I worked as their part–time CTO. A fast–growing ecommerce startup, last year they raised $73 million. I built the first iteration of their internal CRM tool and its integration with the warehouse so we could have real-time inventory tracking. I then hired their tech team and developed a roadmap with a realistic understanding of what skills they would need on the team. The company had suffered a poor relationship with several outside 3rd party agencies. Several “buy or build” decisions had to be reviewed and shifted from “buy” to “build.” Integrating with the 3PL warehouse was an ETL project involving NodeJS to MongoDB, then to Snowflake and Looker for the BI team, which I initiated and then handed off to the team we hired.

Jan 2020 – Present · 6 yrs 3 mos · New York, United States

• I'm currently advising several entrepreneurs as they build up and launch their startups, and this includes:
• https://gruntledx.com/
• https://unslant.ai/
• https://left-field.co/
• I have 24 years experience writing code and building teams. Most of my experience is with early stage startups, moving them from 0 to 1 to 1,000,000. I've also helped rescue large firms that have gotten into trouble.
• If your company is drowning in tech debt, I can help you.
• If you are just launching your company, I can help you.
• In 2001 I launched my own startup, https://www.starchive.io/, and I was CTO there till 2010, but now I focus on helping other entrepreneurs.
• I've developed teams, I've mentored junior level developers, I've also inspired senior level developers.
• I've worked in the fields of media, publishing, agriculture, social networks, drug treatment, hotels, AirBnB and STR, transportation, healthcare, machine learning, natural language processing (NLP) and AI. I've built e-commerce sites for consumer goods. I've worked both B2C and B2B. I've developed mobile apps and desktop apps and web sites.
• I've played the role of Fractional CTO but I've also helped develop marketing and go-to-market (GTM) strategies. I've helped refine the sales process, and I've helped enforce the the sales process via Salesforce or Hubspot. I've worked with sales teams as small as 3 and as large as 390. I've also extended and further developed these CRMs, and their adjacent technologies (Gainsight, for instance) to help with customer support.

Jun 2017 – Present · 8 yrs 10 mos · New York City Metropolitan Area · On-site

• Once a month I organize an event that pulls together people who are active in the New York City startup scene.
• These events bring together CEOs, CFOs, CMOs, CTOs and VCs and podcasters and engineers, Product Managers and marketers. A broad range of creatives and visionaries who are building the future.
• I've recently started collaborating with the Tavern Coworking Community, see our January, 2025 event here:
• https://www.linkedin.com/posts/benjamin-schwartz-brandeis_yesterday-tavern-community-coworking-cohosted-activity-7287879412597817344-kcnL/

Sep 2018 – Mar 2020 · 1 yr 6 mos · New York, New York, United States · On-site

• An agency that served as a research & development department for Avis Rental Cars. We worked on their "Smart City" app, written in React, integrating all transport APIs, both public and private. I both hired and ran the software team. Evaluated 3rd party transport and mobility APIs for integration, set out principles for our “buy or build” decisions. Avis Rental Cars was also involved in a 2 year, $25 million effort to unify their many different databases, in various countries, behind a single unified API. This was a massive ETL effort, for which they were using tools from Mulesoft. The company’s different databases pushed data into Kafka. The unified data was then served from ElasticSearch. The Smart City App was the first “customer” for the new API, so we worked with the API team to fine–tune the use case. I also flew out to Lawrence City, in Missouri, to talk to the officials who oversaw the mass transit for the metropolitan area – they were the first to integrate with our Smart City app, and so I worked closely with them.

Feb 2018 – Dec 2018 · 10 mos · New York, New York, United States · On-site

• An incredible new security startup that took advantage of the high security networks that exist inside of cell phone companies, routing requests inside of those networks so as to provide an extra layer of protection to transactions involving money. Once again, Mark Herschberg was the CTO (he'd previously hired me at ShermansTravel.com in 2011) and he asked me to come work with him again to setup application architecture and the devops system. The application code was written in Python, wrapped in Docker. I used Jenkins to write a custom deployment system. Rather than use Kubernetes, we used the AWS stack: pushing our Docker images into the Elastic Container Registry and then pushing them out to Elastic Container Service. A complex devops setup that enabled extremely high levels of reliability, which our cell phone partners were expecting from us.

Feb 2016 – Dec 2017 · 1 yr 10 mos · New York, New York, United States · On-site

• A thriving startup that used NLP and data scraping to accumulate financial information about privately held companies. Some unstructured geographic address information could not be parsed with any of our NLP tools, so we used Mechanical Turk. Raw data was dumped into AWS S3, then later Kafka. DynamoDB was used as an intermediate layer for storing some data that was only partially processed. Initiated the use of ElasticSearch to replace an overly–complicated custom built PHP API. Their main app was written using PHP Laravel framework. Created a system of triggers to auto–update the ElasticSearch with data from the main MySQL database. Massive ROI thanks to simplification. Also used entire ELK stack for some reporting. Finally, I built their Salesforce app, which is now in the Salesforce app store.

Jan 2015 – Dec 2015 · 11 mos · New York, New York, United States · On-site

• Using NLP to understand the text messages that salespeople type on their phones, Rollio would transform the texts from human languages to computer languages and then make use of the Salesforce API to update the Opportunities, Contacts, and Accounts of each salesperson. Relying on Clojure and Java, and making use of the Stanford Natural Language Processing open source libraries, I oversaw the creation of a system of microservices that could process large numbers of simultaneous conversations.

Jan 2014 – Dec 2014 · 11 mos · Evansville, Indiana Area · Remote

• LaunchOpen.com is an early stage startup building the future of education software -- a 2nd generation platform that integrates the scattered pieces of the 1st generation. The technology stack is polyglot. Working with Java, Ruby, Clojure and PHP I have built out the essential pieces of a micro-services stack, that both imports data from multiple LMS and SIS packages (for instance, Moodle and OpenSIS), integrates the data into a cohesive whole, and then makes it available via a RESTful architecture serving JSON. The code I created imports from MySQL databases and stores the integrated data as JSON objects in MongoDB. This software will transform the relationship between teachers, students and parents, by allowing a unified interface that draws together the disparate software packages currently in use in schools across the nation.

May 2012 – Dec 2013 · 1 yr 7 mos · New York · On-site

• Time Out got 100 million unique users each month, but they had spent years building a bloated and inconsistent mix of technologies and were now faced with performance issues which left them crippled. They were losing market share to a company from Brazil that was selling a competing publishing system. A new architecture was necessary. I worked with the main team in England to develop a microservices architecture. Choke points, where their PHP/Symfony monolith was especially slow, were pulled out and became independent services, rewritten in languages that ran on the JVM. Created proof of concepts, including a new advertising system written in Clojure. Simplified devops operations, achieved substantial ROI with changes in the use of AWS.

Apr 2011 – May 2012 · 1 yr 1 mo · Greater New York City Area · On-site

• A rescue mission. A travel site afflicted with very high levels of tech debt. In an effort to turn the company around, they hired Mark Herschberg as their CTO. Herschberg then brought me in to help in the turnaround effort. We gave up on a hopeless mess of PHP code and rebuilt the entire system as 6 very clean, focused Ruby apps, built using the Sinatra framework. Also moved from a static setup of 24 servers in a datacenter to a more dynamic setup in AWS. They new system was better able to handle the surge as we grew from 4 million to 8 million subscribers. Eventually the whole tech team was outsourced to an overseas team, but I stayed on for several months to help manage the transition.

Apr 2010 – Apr 2011 · 1 yr · New York, New York, United States · On-site

• The company was struggling with the expense and inflexibility of their tech stack, built in 1999: Sun boxes running Sun Solaris, Oracle database, Java language, Vignette CMS. Converted to an open source stack: Linux, MySQL, PHP, Symfony. Substantial reduction in TCO. Educated the team on the new technologies, expanded frontend team to better compete with new wine apps. Re–launched www.winespectator.com and www.cigaraficionado.com . Built an online school for wine for aspiring sommeliers, opening up new revenue streams.

Apr 2009 – Aug 2016 · 7 yrs 4 mos · New York City · On-site

• My next startup was a "micro consulting" site where customers would pay $20 to $100 to get some immediate help from experts. I grew the business for 7 years, it became a popular site, and then I sold it in the summer of 2016. I hired a small team to help with design and marketing and programming. I oversaw every detail of the business.

Apr 2001 – Feb 2010 · 8 yrs 10 mos · Charlottesville, Virginia, United States · On-site

• My co–founder, Peter Agelasto, and I raised $2 million to commercialize my software, written in PHP. I ran a team of eight, which included programmers, designers, and QA. We built niche communities around online video stores. Ihanuman.com was an immediate success, and it remains successful to this day. Eventually our customers included Bob Dylan and National Geographic. We then specialized in software to handle large video libraries, at which we created: https://www.starchive.io