San Francisco Bay Area
You can call me Ben. Currently engineering my way back to my mechanical and aerospace roots... In early 2025, I wrapped up a chapter as co-founder/CEO of Patchwork Technologies, which I started with engineers that I met at Palantir. Having spent plenty of time debugging incidents, we were obsessed with doing observability properly—not by bolting on another dashboard, but by going back to the source (the code). Software should emit consistent, reliable telemetry. Our mission was to automate the path to getting there, because maintaining instrumentation standards has historically been a very human, and very inconsistent, problem. My journey to founding a software startup has been a little unconventional. My education was in mechanical engineering and then aerospace engineering. I still, on occasion, refer to myself as a fluid dynamicist but the days when I was building jet engine experiments really are in the past. I can point to that period, along with MATLAB, as the genesis of my current career in software. Processing experimental data (DSP) was the name, and writing (something just about resembling software) in MATLAB was the game. What I learnt in terms of thinking deeply about some fairly gnarly data processing challenges would get me a start at Palantir Technologies. I spent almost 5 years there, starting out as a technical-leaning Deployment Strategist (think: solutions architect, project manager, data engineer, analyst rolled in to one) and finishing up building out our sales function within the European and UK Utilities sector. That was a full-circle moment – bringing software together with the world of physical engineering and hardware. Palantir is famously a great place to meet founders, and I'm lucky to have met my two co-founders at Patchwork in the exposed brick halls of the Soho office. When I manage to escape the lab/office you'll probably find me in the mountains (love the Dolomites in particular) hiking or climbing. I never go without a camera so check out my website - benjaminhallphoto.com. (That profile/background photo here is one of mine). A quick note for those wanting to connect: I get several requests every day from people I don't know or have any obvious connection to. It's basically untenable now. Please leave a note letting me know why you'd like to connect and I'll do my best.
Building an LLM-powered insight extraction engine for a YC-backed startup
Took some time away from engineering after winding down Invaria/Patchwork. Goal: skiing, get good.
A YC-backed startup with a mission to rebuild software observability from the ground up. (Now wound down)
Simulation and modelling for a SF-based carbon removal startup.