About
I’m Ben Saren, Co-Founder and CEO of CitySquares, a local search company that specializes in providing small businesses with online exposure in a hyper-local (neighborhood) context. I co-founded the company with my friend Bob Leland. This is my professional blog, Your Suspect, where I talk about various entrepreneurial topics, as well as local search, startup life, the life of CitySquares and of a CEO and entrepreneur. (Why I called it Your Suspect)
CitySquares was formed out of my very own need for something like this. As a resident of Davis Square, in Somerville, MA, I frequently found myself frustrated by the lack of available online information for places, mainly businesses, in my community. This frustration actually goes back to the late 90’s, right around the time Sidewalk.com was acquired by Citysearch.
Prior to CitySquares I ran another company called Atomic Enterprises, which was an organically grown business that started (like CitySquares) in a spare bedroom in an old apartment. Atomic was a service business with a handful of employees and dozens of contractors nationwide. We helped SMEs (small and medium size enterprises, mostly B2B) get with technology. That ranged from tel/data infrastructure and cabling projects in high rises for global companies like Tisham Speyer Properties in Boston and NY, to LAN, WAN, VPN, implementation and management for small neighborhood businesses. We also had a new media practice that helped these same businesses, as well as others, get on the Internet, and do so correctly. After five year run and some success, but very little personal satisfaction, Atomic was wound down and dissolved in 2005.
Atomic taught me an extraordinary amount about running a small business, being in the trenches, getting my hands dirty, making mistakes, and learning lessons. It also showed me just how much help other small businesses really need when it comes to technology and the Internet. Looking back now, I think that too played a big role in the founding principles of CitySquares.
Before Atomic, I worked at a variety of companies ranging from small and medium sized enterprises, as well as startups, like Delphi Forums, Prospero Technologies, Cambridge Energy Resource Associates, as well as huge multi-nationals like Parametric Technologies Corporation, Bell Atlantic, GE Capital, Digital Equipment Corporation. Ultimately, I hated all of it – hated working for someone else.
That’s been a theme all throughout my life actually. It affected my greatly on the playground, in the classroom, on the ball field, on the street, and on the job. In my younger days I was often called, by various people in positions of power over me, “non-conformist” and “oppositional” and “defiant” among many others. At times this was a huge problem for me – got me into lots of trouble. But I also won’t argue that it’s taught me huge lessons, and I’m here and alive to talk about it. Now I’m running a successful Internet company, and having a blast doing it. Needless to say, I’m still me, but I’ve learned to – conform and obey better, I suppose. (I hate admitting that!)
As I mentioned earlier, I live in the Davis Square neighborhood of Somerville, MA, with my angel of a wife, Ali. She’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me and I probably would be somewhere very different if it wasn’t for her. We share our humble home with our two cats and nine fish.
Outside of all this professional and entrepreneurial stuff, I take a fancy in a great many other things including baseball (big Red Sox fan and season ticket owner), golf, camping and hiking, photography, astronomy, music, and I have a strange sort of passion for studying the world’s religions and belief systems (dogmas) and their histories, and various metaphysical subject matters. At the time I write this page, I have three books of these topics on my nightstand.
I also have another blog at ben.iswhoi.am. It’s a more personal kind of website, for creative expression, and for talking about politics, pop-culture, art, music, and other things that strike my fancy. It’s not for everyone, then again neither am I.
There’s lots of links on the right and left sides of this blog where you can find me on the various social networks and so forth.
Thanks for coming, thanks for reading, and feel free to contact me here.
