Benjamin Stein

Ben oversees Messaging products at Twilio, including SMS, MMS, and OTT. Previously he was co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Mobile Commons, acquired by Upland Software, where he was responsible for product development, system architecture, and account management. 

Ben has 20 years of experience building Internet applications of all shapes and sizes. He spent much of his career building distributed software for B2B customers. With a background in both the financial and medical industries, he has extensive experience with high availability systems with a focus on security and data sensitivity. As a software engineer at Bloomberg LP, Ben developed their trading system, search engine, and web services. After Bloomberg, he worked at ShadowTV, transcoding, indexing and streaming 100s of terabytes of video data for government and corporate customers.

He earned a BS in electrical and biological engineering and a Master's in medical image processing, both at Cornell University. After completing his studies, he took a position as a Visiting Scientist, developing medical software used in clinical trials for lung cancer screening and image analysis tools used in General Electric's CT scanners.

Ben lives in Oakland CA with his wife Arin and sons Gabriel & Ezekiel. He can usually be found coding Ruby, biking, playing basketball, listening to Audible, or losing at pub trivia. He is one of the leading pioneers shaping how organizations successfully use messaging for advocacy, fundraising, list building, and organizing. He sits on the board of ioby.org and advises nonprofits on effective uses of technology.