Octo.Dad - Ben Galbraith

I’m Ben Galbraith, a married forty-something American raising eight kids while working in tech. To learn more about my work history, see LinkedIn; a short summary is below.

In January 2025, my family and I left Silicon Valley for an overseas adventure in London, where I joined Tessl. Since stepping back to an advisory role in December 2025, I’ve been busy adventuring, parenting, building, and advising. We plan to return in summer 2027 or 2028.

I used to blog, but it’s been a while, and it’s all pretty outdated. I do occasionally share random thoughts on Threads, Twitter, or Bluesky.

I play a lot of board games, and, for reasons I don’t entirely understand, I log every play; you can see the gory details at Board Game Geek.

You can reach me by sending an email to my first or last name @ octo.dad.[*]

Career Highlights

Tessl (2024 — 2025)

Founding product lead; shifted to advisor in Dec. 2025.

Investor (2015+)

Have made ~20 angel investments in early-stage tech startups. Also an LP in the Uncorrelated 2020 and 2022 VC funds.

Google (2015 — 2019; 2020 — 2024)

Senior product + design + GTM leader on Firebase, Chrome, and Identity / Passkeys.

Segment (2019 — 2020)

In-between my two Google runs, I was VP Product up until Segment’s acquisition by Twilio.

Walmart (2010 — 2015)

VP Engineering for mobile US business for two years, then VP Product + Design + Engineering for all global ecommerce.

Palm (2009 — 2010)

Led Developer Marketing for webOS. My team also created what a leading tech journalist called the best mobile Facebook app of the era.

Mozilla (2008 — 2009)

Co-created Bespin, an open-source, web-based code editor; a few years ahead of its time.

Ajaxian (2007 — 2008)

Co-founded the leading web developer community of the Ajax / Web 2.0 movement; sold it to TechTarget.

Acer (1994 — 1996)

Left high school to lead a small software development team making Windows and early web apps. Super fun.