Bennett Barouch, Advisor / Mentor / Coach

References

As a technical advisor to ReReply, Bennett has been instrumental in evaluating technologists and technology. Early on, when I was searching for technical co-founders (one of whom became my CTO), Bennett provided straightforward feedback about how they could be best utilized, and how they would fit in with the company, as we became a larger organization. At one point, I was considering a merger with someone with a much stronger technical background. Bennett quickly pointed out flaws (the technology was closer to an experiment than a product) as well as helping me clearly see if I wanted to work with the person. While we could tell the mergee was clearly brilliant, it didn't make sense as a business decision. Bennett's insight helped me get clarity quickly. Bennett has both strong technical and business sense, and can converse skillfully with both types of people and organizations. I consider myself very lucky to have had him on my team. Jason Wong, CEO

Bennett took requirements, designed, and implemented both our company website and an information management system that has enabled me to significantly enlarge the number of customers we can serve. In the decade we have been using his software, it has dramatically increased our income, and has had almost no bugs at all, and none the past several years.

In addition to working on critical technical assignments, Bennett has been an invaluable source of information and advice on how to scale AdmissionWise. He has helped us better define and differentiate our products, target appropriate customers, hire and train new staff, and create a viable timeline to introduce new products. In a nutshell, his capacity to map his years of experience in high tech software companies to this entirely different domain is genuinely impressive. When we discuss an idea either one of us has introduced, his openness and knowledge contribute to exciting, productive explorations, and to conclusions the company can implement. I recommend him highly to any business in search of guidance on strategy, execution, or both, whether tackling current problems or growing the business. Annie Roskin, CEO & President

Bennett was a technical advisor to Systems In Motion in establishing an agile applications development practice. In this role, he was instrumental in developing the baseline for the practice, benchmarking it against global services organizations, and reviewing the current engineering practices at the company. He did a very effective job and exceeded my expectations. Neeraj Gupta, CEO

Bennett joined Palamida and orchestrated a re-architecting of the flagship product and drove the creation of the new vulnerability and workflow solutions that substantially differentiated the company in the market. He consistently hired good developers and created a loyal and motivated team environment. Bennett also contributed to the marketing messages, was great with customers, and provided constructive feedback to the organization. Rick Oswald, VP of Sales

I worked as a peer of Bennett's at iPass where we worked together to deliver solutions to prospects and customers. Bennett distinguishes himself from others in his role through a focus on strong methodology while also maintaining understanding of the needs of other departments and most importantly the customer. He has outstanding customer-facing skills and commands a strong ability to build trust and confidence even in the most challenging of customer situations. I recommend Bennett for any technology leadership function requiring a disciplined approach to facilitating results and knowledgeable and personable interaction with internal and external customers. Jim McGuire, VP of Sales

Bennett is one of the best engineering leaders I have worked with. He has a well-deserved reputation within his team as being a great boss and mentor. He blends business savvy, great hiring skills, and people management skills that have created a world-class and highly loyal engineering department. He gets powerful results by empowering his team, treating them well, and ensuring that they understand the underlying business problems. He is the real deal when it comes to looking for an engineering head that can grow and cultivate a team. Theresa Bui Friday, Founder, and VP of Marketing

Bennett is a great partner. As a PM, I love working with engineers who are thinking about the big picture and Bennett always wants to understand what problem we are trying to solve, not just take a list of requirements and implement them. Not only does Bennett care deeply about our customers, he cares deeply about his team and it is shows in how he makes sure that they are set up for success in their projects. Steve Kafka, Director of Product Management

Bennett is one of the few engineering managers I have come across who truly strive to balance business and customer needs with technical excellence. He takes the time to understand the problem space asking relevant questions to ensure the solutions are designed to address them. An ideal partner every product manager looks for. Anu Mandalam, Product Manager

Bennett is the best VP of Engineering I've worked for. He is able to keep his teams focused on achieving the objectives needed by the business while maintaining a high level of morale – even when times are difficult. He is excellent at keeping his staff lean and high-performing. He is decisive, articulate and a terrific person to work for. Larry Hartsook, Architect

Bennett is a sensational leader, thinker and person. Bennett came to Yodlee and helped us mature as an organization by successfully introducing new methodologies while keeping us productive. Despite overseeing a very large team, Bennett always takes the extra time to keep his team happy and motivated, always taking the time for one-on-ones with not only his direct reports, but their reports as well. During this time he is genuine, inquisitive and provides invaluable feedback. This extra effort means Bennett is always on top of all of myriad of activities across the organization, and is always able to manage, lead, design and make the decisions that cause us to succeed. I would work in an organization led by Bennett any time. David Azaria, UI Manager

Bennett is a thoughtful engineering leader and is skilled at motivating a team to deliver results while using engineering best-practices. As a leader, Bennett:

Set clear expectations and regularly followed-up with his team on open tasks and issues.
Demonstrated clear decision-making, and set like expectations on other leaders with the goal of having clear direction for his team and the organization.
Provided relevant feedback to myself and others on his team, lending to personal growth.
Bennett demonstrated engineering excellence and technical acumen during design reviews and when triaging production issues. The system designs he proposed worked well at scale and helped to reduce maintenance costs. Bennett set expectations on his team to design services that have a clear purpose, and that aim to eliminate ongoing manual efforts when exposing the services to new verticals or marketplaces. He established standards (e.g the standard contribution format for eBay's product catalog) that improved communication and efficiency across internal teams and simplified the interface of the external API.
Bennett demonstrated innovation and attention to quality. During triage and analysis of site issues with our catalog service database, Bennett set expectations on our core platform team that DB systems are to perform in a predictable fashion without inexplicable spikes of latency, even if the average latency is within SLA. Bennett was also a key contributor to designing a novel and simple ETL system that supports pluggable transformation modules such that the common processing platform can run without the need of a supporting team. Bennett helped to make several strategic decisions that raised efficiency and cut costs company-wide, including a reduction and consolidation of a multi-organization system that obtains and processes seller listing data, and a partnership with core engineering on a novel graph database which has since been released as open-source.

Jeff Cavano, Chief Architect

Bennett is a seasoned technical leader with a deep understanding of both the workings and applicability of a broad range of relevant technologies and patterns. During out time together we played with everything from ML pipelines to graph-based solutions to the more mundane elements of legacy system support and how to work our way out of it. He has good understanding of managing change within an organization and a great appreciation for engineering and what makes engineers happy and effective.

Ron Knapp, VP & Business Unit Head

I first met Bennett when I interviewed at eBay. He carefully explained the team structure, responsibilities, and shared with me pros and cons from his own perspective. He was very warm and genuine and the discussion with him played an important role in my decision to join eBay. Later on, I started collaborating with the knowledge graph team managed by Bennett. Since eBay is a big company, I kind of expected some level of red tape because this collaboration is across two big organizations. To my surprise, Bennett and his team have been very open and transparent from the very beginning. The focus has always been what can we do to improve user experience. And we jointly laid out a concrete plan to leverage knowledge graph in eBay Search. Bennett is an awesome collaborator to have. Zhe Wu, Distinguished Engineer & Architect

Bennett is a great engineering leader. He has a tremendous knowledge of not only technology, but also building highly efficient and motivated teams. His management and leadership experience, organization and interpersonal skills make him as effective with partners, customers as with executive leadership. Bennett always creates development opportunities for his team and his team feel empowered and trusted. I enjoyed working with Bennett. Roman Maslovskis, Director, Applied Research / Principal Research Scientist

I had the pleasure to work twice with Bennett at two different companies as peers. In both cases it was a great experience working with him. He is a very experienced engineering leader who is fully capable leading a strong team of engineers. He has a comprehensive technical knowledge in multiple domains. He is quick to understand complex design issues and come with original proposals. I saw Bennett giving clear guidance to his team and motivating them to achieve their goals no matter how hard it is. Last but not least, he fully understand the software development life cycle and implements the right balance between process and agility, as appropriate for the specific company he works for. Moti Eliav, Site Manager & Sr Director of Engineering

Bennett is a great engineering leader and I really enjoyed working with him. As relatively a junior manager myself, I got full support from Bennett. He enabled me to find my own way to become a better manager for my team. Bennett willingly shared his vast knowledge and experience which helped me with different dilemmas. No matter what, I knew that Bennett will back me up despite the fact that we worked remotely (him being in San Jose and my team located in Israel). I feel that Bennett helped my personal growth as a manager and I appreciate the time we worked together. Avital Mashuta, Manager

I have the pleasure of working closely with Bennett in the Structured Data group at eBay. He's a seasoned professional, and understands that engineering is a delicate set of trade-offs between technology, functionality, customers and time to market. He genuinely cares about the people working for him, as well as the projects at hand. He always aims to have the right thing done, and works with his teams and other teams outside our group to make that happen. He is interested in the technical aspects of the projects, but understands that it's generally not managements job to make technical decisions. Simon Fell, VP & Fellow

Bennett has outstanding software architecture understanding. He is able to come with the fast and simple solutions to complex problems. He is also a great leader, motivates his team and his people really like working for him. Any organization will benefit from having Bennett. Noam Zilberman, Director of DevOps & QA

I found Bennett to be a clear thinker and communicator, with a very pragmatic approach to solving problems. He deeply understands the scrum/agile approach to software engineering and is a capable team leader and people manager. As a colleague, Bennett was a great partner and collaborator. Mike Nappi, VP of Engineering

Bennett is a very senior engineering leader with strong technical expertise. He is analytical, goal oriented, and data driven. Bennett has always been quality conscious, process oriented, yet pragmatic in balancing the same with the business needs. At ServiceNow he has built a solid QA team ground up in a very short period of time, implemented Scrum, and streamlined the development and release processes — significantly enhancing the quality of the product releases. I would welcome the opportunity to work with Bennett again. Kranthi Ravi, Sr. Director

I was impressed with how fast Bennett was able to take full ownership. Bennett is a very experienced VP of engineering and this shows in his daily work – quickly reacting to events, understating the full situation, communicating with customers as well as employees and taking thoughtful decisions. Bennett is also hard working, very dedicated and a great person to work with. I would love to work with him again. Moti Eliav, VP of Engineering

Bennett is an outstanding Vice President of Engineering who excels at building and managing high performance teams to deliver scalable software products and solutions. He is not only an excellent technologist, but understands the business needs and has always been a great bridge between engineering and business. He is a great manager, skilled in managing distributed teams and leads his teams from the front, taking ownership to ensure schedules are met. He will be a valuable asset to any organization he joins. Shailesh Nivsarkar, VP of Business Development

I highly recommend Bennett as a VP of Engineering, he is a strong manager and leader for a development organization. He has a deep understanding of the technical side of product development balanced by awareness of business needs, which is very valuable in making the tough decisions and trade-offs necessary to deliver product to market. In addition to his technical abilities, he has a talent for hiring strong candidates and developing the potential in his team. He and his team are one of the best I have worked with. Mike Ehlers, VP of Product Management

Bennett was a creative and dedicated VP of Engineering for iPass, I enjoyed the personal interaction, and getting the work done with a focus on quality and timeliness to market need. John Charters, COO

Bennett is a very technically-oriented engineering manager, who knows how to strike the right balance between delivering on-time and delivering a quality product. I enjoyed working with Bennett at General Magic, at iPass, and again at eBay. Barbara Nelson, CTO

Bennett is an experienced technologist, manager and strategist. At iPass he was able to take a small engineering team and quickly build it into a solid organization that could be counted on to deliver multiple client and server releases each year, while keeping staff turnover low. He has a strong understanding of the balance between offshoring vs. maintaining control of projects. He also is a strong planner who knows how to work with a CFO proactively and effectively – a good communicator. Don McCauley, CFO

I hired Bennett to lead the ISE Platform Engineering team at Cisco after a long and very careful search. Bennett clearly stands out as a team player and always tries to optimize for the needs of the business unit over his own team. His strong communication skills and diverse background prepare him well for the challenges one faces as an engineering leader. Pramod Badjate, Sr. Director

Bennett is a results oriented VP who gives you the liberty to think out of the box and be creative in your work. He is very knowledgeable, disciplined and meticulous in his approach. He is compassionate, always leads from the front and is an excellent mentor. Given an opportunity I would love to work with him again. Mahendra Gianchandani, Director of Engineering

I reported to Bennett for over two years while working at iPass, and then worked with him again at Yodlee. Bennett is an excellent leader. He is a creative thinker who works to ensure his vision and expectations are clear – an important characteristic for a boss. He is also a great mentor. I learned a lot from Bennett about integrity within the software development process – quality engineering as a discipline, across all organizations, not just QA. Diana Westnedge, QA Manager

Bennett's leadership and team building skills were instrumental in establishing an environment of success – although my team and I were located in a remote office, it never felt that way as Bennett's guidance was always present. I deeply respect Bennett's ability to effectively manage highly technical teams and drive productivity. It was a pleasure working for Bennett and I would enjoy working with him again in the future should the opportunity arise. Alan Hand, Director of Engineering

Bennett joined Comergent during a period of rapid growth. We were trying to make the leap from early startup to serious player. Bennett immediately grasped the complexities of the situation and instilled the needed structure and discipline to help make that transition. He instilled consistency and predictability in our engineering approach and scheduling. At the same time he was able to make the difficult pragmatic decisions that are sometimes necessary in a young company. I would gladly work for Bennett again. Scott Philips, Manager