Ben Cook is a startup CEO and a strategist with a passion for human complexity.
Most recently, he took over & scaled Riva before selling to Teal in late 2022.
About Riva
Ben originally joined Riva as COO in August 2021, pre-revenue, and led product development, user research and go-to-market strategy.
After taking over as CEO in October 2021, he scaled from $0 to $1m run rate in 6 months, with a 7:1 LTV:CAC on the 1st transaction.
Riva negotiated millions of dollars in incremental salary across thousands of users before exiting in December 2022 via a sale to Teal HQ, a personal career growth platform founded by WeWork’s former Chief Product Officer & Chief Growth Officer David Fano.
About Ben
Outside of entrepreneurship, Ben spends his time researching, publishing, and lecturing at Harvard Business School on negotiation strategy. His work has been published in HBR and in the Negotiation Journal, and he has helped teach executive education courses at HBS, presented at conferences from the Harvard Law School/MIT Program on Negotiation and at international business schools globally, and – through the Program on Legislative Negotiation – has led keynote sessions and hands-on trainings on congressional dealmaking for the U.S. House and Senate.
Previously, Ben founded a consulting business focused on digital strategy in high-stakes scenarios, using sophisticated OSINT and network analytics to help organizations navigate global information chaos. He also served as Vice President at Lax Sebenius LLC, a negotiation strategy firm that works with leaders in the highest levels of business and government to achieve consistently superior results in their most important deals.
Before starting his entrepreneurial journey, Ben drove commercial growth strategy at Storyful – a startup founded by journalists and acquired by News Corp, which focused on delivering intelligence and counter-disinformation services to major social media platforms, newsrooms and corporate clients worldwide. Working across the sales, product, marketing and intelligence teams, he was internally poached by the executive team to help develop & launch a wide range of new products & initiatives globally.
Ben joined Storyful after using their services himself to help craft change, crisis and issues management strategies for Fortune 500 companies at Weber Shandwick, and in a past life he consulted on developing novel brand-level approaches to countering Islamic State recruitment online for the Department of Defense, State, and a White House task force.
Ben studied the unconscious drivers of political belief at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy, and in his spare time invests in and works to support the urban revitalization of Atlantic City, NJ.
Ben is lucky enough to be married to Linya Hu, an engineering manager, painter and recovering investment banker. Together with their three-year-old Golden Retriever, Ginger, they live in Brooklyn and travel the world.