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Who is Ben Yoskovitz?
A co-founder of Highline Beta, the Toronto-based venture studio. BetaKit reported its launch in July 2016 with Yoskovitz and Marcus Daniels as co-founders, and Highline Beta's own site lists him as CPO and Founding Partner. He is also the co-author, with Alistair Croll, of Lean Analytics.
How does he describe Highline Beta's model?
At launch he told BetaKit that Highline Beta works with large corporate customers to identify and validate problem areas, brings in founders to start companies in those areas, and provides the first funding into those startups. In a 2016 interview with SKMurphy he summed up the hypothesis as corporate customers plus venture-backable founders plus pre-seed capital making for better startups.
What did he do before Highline Beta?
He started a web services agency in 1996. In 2010 he co-founded Year One Labs, an early-stage accelerator that backed five consumer startups, one of which, Localmind, was acquired by Airbnb. He was VP of product at GoInstant, a company later acquired by Salesforce, from 2012 to 2014, and afterwards VP of product at VarageSale.
What is Lean Analytics about?
It is a 2013 book on using data to build startups, co-written with Alistair Croll. In a 2015 BetaKit interview Yoskovitz said many founders struggle with the measure step of build-measure-learn, that data shows what is happening but not why, and that early-stage teams should focus on one primary metric rather than tracking many.