Ben Hilborn

Build | Empower | Nurture

Hi, I’m Ben.I'm a technologist, strategist, problem solver, and builder. I'm an electrical engineer by training and founder by passion. I have worked with, led, and advised ventures in industries like consumer electronics, industrial sensing, supply chain & logistics, and medical technology.I build social-good projects in my spare time, Nurturacy & Citizen Power.I am an avid proponent of regenerative economies and collaborative communities, and I offer my time and energy to municipalities and non-profits to design for a brighter, friendlier future.

• Strategy
• Product Dev
• Electrification
• The Village
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© Benjamin Hilborn. All rights reserved.

Strategy

One of the ways that I try to make the world a better place is by helping other ventures with the problems they're facing. Be it individual coaching or as a named advisor, via my product development agency Alpha, or working in the funding strategy arm of the venture capital firm Thin Air Labs, I work hard to help others shine a different light on their problems, and build plans for success.
You'll find my work in everything from pricing strategies and business models, to go-to-market plans and custom content, down to technical design decisions and certification plans.

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Product Development

Managing the product development process is in my DNA, from customer discovery and market definition, to design and specification, all the way through to marketing and sales.
Most notably, I lead a phenomenal team in building Obvious, a SaaS product orchestration platform with the goal of making it profitable to maintain devices longer. Our patented technology was deployed to 100s of thousands of devices worldwide, and we partnered with a world-leading supplier to distribute it even further. You can catch a couple of my public talks about it to the right and here.I have also been incredibly fortunate to have spent time launching both hardware and software products with intrepid tech companies in various fields, such as 4iiii (consumer and industrial electronics), Zephyr Sleep (medical devices), and ZeroKey (logistics and location technologies).

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Electrification

A huge passion of mine that grows greater by the day is the desire for every community to have energy security. Whether this is a city in a grid-strained state, or a developing village building their very first electrical infrastructure, we are nearing the end of the centralized power distribution era, and require some serious outside-the-box thinking.Massive point loads like EVs charging and distributed and variable sources like solar, wind, and tidal power are the title changes of the coming electrical landscape, and present problems and opportunities that are magnified by our rapidly changing climate.Software, hardware, and policies will all be key to coordinating and leveraging these distributed energy resources, and I intend for the next chapter of my career to focus on making these commonplace across North America.The contribution to this space that I'm working on right now is the Citizen Power network. This is a P2P charger sharing platform that enables public L2 charging in vastly more places by allowing hosts to monetize home chargers, and has built-in support for load shedding and fleet use.

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The Village

A belief that I hold very deeply is that we, in North American culture, have made a grave error in discarding dependence on our communities in favour of dogged individualism.Modern humans are afflicted by a desire to at once be self-reliant, but simultaneously catered to by a society that values consumerism and near-instant solutions to problems rather than building systems that are increasingly beneficial for generations.The change I want to create in the world is a movement towards smaller, more cohesive communities, where humans are inter-reliant on others in the community, self-reliant as a group, and collaborative between groups to ensure that everyone’s needs are met and we become more resilient as a race.This is a vision of taking all our best advances and using them to build communities that are fit for the future. My effort can be seen in the design of two innovation centres in Cochrane and Okotoks, my soon-to-be community garden on the West Coast, and smaller initiatives like the "Labrynth" at St. Mary's.

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