Ben Downey’s career began when his academic pursuits as a quantitative economist and applied statistician led to a summer internship with a Fortune 100 company that illustrated the value of using quantitative methods to analyze large business datasets. Although it wasn’t well-defined at the time, this line of work ultimately came to be called data science. Ben’s early data science experience focused on developing practical business applications for previously academic techniques like K-means clustering, covariate analysis and customer behavior segmentation for consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies, large national retailers and restaurants.
In 2013, Ben joined
Amazon where he was part of the team building the Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) business, one of the foundational players in the direct-to-consumer ecommerce space. With double-digit growth rates on a billion dollar business unit, FBA introduced Ben to the extreme of scaling challenges, massive datasets, and the intricacies of two-sided marketplaces.
Three years later, Ben joined
BigCommerce, a late-stage ecommerce startup competing with Shopify. Over the course of the next six years, Ben’s remit grew, leading a team of 40+, centralizing revenue operations and strategy functions and participating in multiple fundraising rounds. As a member of the executive team, Ben was intimately involved in readying the company for a successful IPO in 2020.
In 2021, Ben took the plunge into the early-stage startup world, joining Smartrr (a subscription ecommerce app for Shopify) 9 months after its founding. As Chief Operating Officer at
Smartrr he helped guide the company through a Series A fundraise in early 2023 and a successful acquisition exit in 2025.
