Former Google Chief Information Officer Joins Rally Ventures Full-Time as Venture Partner Ben Fried will strengthen Rally’s expertise in engineering leadership, cybersecurity, managing hypergrowth and building enterprise software.
Menlo Park, CA
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August 10, 2023 08:03 AM Central Daylight Time
Rally Ventures, a leading venture capital firm focused on early-stage business technology, today announced that Ben Fried has joined the company as a Venture Partner. Ben has worked with Rally Ventures for over a decade as an advisor and investor, and he will now take on a full-time role with the firm.
In his capacity as Venture Partner, Ben will expand Rally's expertise in engineering leadership, cybersecurity, managing hypergrowth and building enterprise software. His responsibilities will include identifying and evaluating investment opportunities, contributing to the firm's overall strategic roadmap and advising portfolio companies on how to harness the power of emerging technologies, like Generative AI, to achieve superior results in their products and operations.
From 2008 to 2022, Ben worked at Google, where he was Chief Information Officer and head of the New York City office. As Chief Information Officer, he oversaw the creation and deployment of technologies and systems that enhanced productivity across the organization and facilitated Google's remarkable growth.
Some of the initiatives that Ben led while at Google include BeyondCorp, the company's groundbreaking implementation of a zero trust network architecture; Google's in-house videoconferencing system; and the creation of its industry-leading IT Residency Program.
Prior to his time at Google, Ben was employee #1 at a bay area startup building mission-scheduling software for NASA. And, he spent over a decade at Morgan Stanley, where he was the architect of the firm's technology platform, and led teams responsible for software development infrastructure and business intelligence.
"Rally Ventures has a strong track record of identifying disruptive technologies and a reputation for being committed investors who actively support the growth of their portfolio companies,” said Ben Fried, Venture Partner at Rally Ventures. “Combining my knowledge overseeing the creation of software tools used by billions of people and managing billion-dollar corporate purchases of third-party software with Rally's best-in-class B2B deal flow is a natural fit.”
Ben will strengthen Rally’s team of three managing directors, four venture partners and seven professionals. The firm also includes a network of 100+ technology partners — executives, technologists and luminaries — who act as an extension to the Rally Ventures team and provide operating leverage for portfolio companies to help broaden the firm's capabilities.
“Ben has been a Rally Technology Partner since day one. We’ve known him for over a decade, and he’s provided meaningful guidance and support to many of our portfolio companies,” said Charles Beeler, Co-Founder and Managing Director at Rally Ventures. “Ben’s experience working for a company at the leading edge of technology, combined with his unique ability to distinguish which emerging technologies will make an impact versus where they are just hype, is invaluable.”
"Ben has worked with a number of our portfolio companies on how to use AI and ML in enterprise technology," said Jeff Hinck, Co-Founder and Managing Director at Rally Ventures. "AI is set to disrupt virtually every industry, business process and even the very development of software for both start-ups and mega-tech companies. Ben’s ability to guide our portfolio companies in both how to build a strong technical foundation and how to adopt AI efficiently will set them apart from the competition."
About Rally Ventures
Rally Ventures invests exclusively in early-stage business technology companies, focusing on entrepreneurs creating major new markets or bringing transformative approaches to existing ones. Since 1997, Rally Ventures' partners and venture capital industry veterans have invested in or run early stage enterprise business-to-business technology companies with a proven ability to deliver superior returns regardless of the overall market environment. For more information visit rallyventures.com.
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