Benjamin Garrard
I build for founders, ship quickly with incomplete information, and genuinely love the Austin startup community.
Founder and engineer with a track record of helping early-stage teams turn ambiguity into working systems, better stories, and usable products. I am at my best around builders: onboarding partners, tightening product feedback loops, unblocking technical decisions, and creating energy around what a team is making.
“I want to be useful everywhere Capital Factory creates momentum: helping founders, supporting programs, translating between technical and non-technical people, and making the room more ambitious.”
Tailored Summary
Capital Factory sits at the intersection of startups, investors, operators, and community — and that is exactly the kind of environment where I do my best work. I have built venture-backed products, supported enterprise deployments, run founder-style operations, and created communities around technical products.
I would bring a rare mix of founder empathy, technical fluency, documentation discipline, and event-energy execution: I can help a startup debug a workflow, help a program explain value more clearly, help a community member feel welcome, and help internal teams move from idea to shipped improvement fast.
What I would contribute at Capital Factory
- Founder-facing credibility from having shipped products, raised expectations, and lived startup tradeoffs firsthand.
- Program and event support with technical depth: demos, office hours, founder triage, product feedback, and ecosystem storytelling.
- High-trust relationship building across entrepreneurs, investors, mentors, and internal teams.
- Operational follow-through: notes, docs, tooling, and repeatable systems that make community work scale.
Professional Experience
- Led product, engineering, partner onboarding, and day-to-day execution for a startup that reached a $5M valuation.
- Worked directly with business owners, translating operational pain points into product decisions, implementation plans, and shipped software.
- Built systems on GCP, Stripe Connect onboarding flows, and operational tooling while also handling the founder work of prioritization, communication, and trust-building.
- Created 500+ Loom videos and a documentation-heavy culture so teammates and partners could move faster with less ambiguity.
- Built and launched an AI Photoshop plugin used by 100+ daily active users, balancing product development with community support and fast iteration.
- Moderated a user Discord, answered questions directly, collected product feedback, and turned user pain into roadmap decisions and feature improvements.
- Created a user experience that made advanced AI workflows feel accessible for working creatives rather than just technical early adopters.
- Partnered with customers on integrations, troubleshooting, and enablement across ServiceNow, Active Directory, Slack, Teams, FreshDesk, and NetSuite.
- Built internal Python tooling used by 30+ technical users, with an estimated $200K annual savings by reducing investigations from hours to minutes.
- Earned recognition for documentation and Q&A contributions, reflecting a consistent habit of making complex systems easier for others to navigate.
- Founded a VR-focused student organization and helped create a home for technically curious builders to learn, collaborate, and ship.
- Led peers around emerging technology in a way that mixed enthusiasm, practical support, and a bias toward making things real.