This is the 119th article in Bears Doing Big Things, a weekly column celebrating the stories of notable M-A alumni.
“Something that I learned to get over was like, ‘I’m this kid. I’ve never had a job, and I’m trying to network and grab coffee with these people to understand what’s going on. I don’t feel comfortable doing this because I don’t have anything to offer them.’ Now, I love talking to people who are curious about what I’m doing and sharing my knowledge with them, because at the end of the day, I think humans love to help each other,” Ben Scott ’05 said.
Scott is an artificial intelligence (AI) Go-To-Market lead at Google, where he helps companies adopt AI to drive growth through smarter customer targeting, automate outreach, and maximize revenue.
Scott was born and raised in Menlo Park. “My dad’s from Boston, and my mom is from Hawaii originally. They met on a bus going to a Vietnam War protest in the ’60s, and fell in love and eloped, and they ended up coming to the Bay Area,” he said.
Before M-A, Scott attended Peninsula School throughout his entire childhood. “There’s about 20 kids per class, and I knew most of those kids from nursery school all the way through eighth grade and graduation,” he said. “It was great in the sense that it created such a small, strong community. At the same time, it wasn’t really diverse—it was a little bit of a bubble.”
“Coming to M-A, it was the complete opposite. It was this massive new thing, and it felt like moving to a new city. I remember having assigned seats and that kind of blowing my mind,” Scott said. “[At M-A] there’s so much diversity and differences in opinions. I think being able to see both sides of the socioeconomic spectrum, and seeing a community that could come together, especially through sporting events, for the unity of the school, was something that I think is a model for society.”
At M-A, Scott played badminton during his junior and senior years. What began as a casual extracurricular quickly turned competitive, with Scott and his partner making it to CCS playoffs. “It was funny because me and my buddy just needed the PE credits, and we ended up being like, ‘Badminton sounds fun. It’s kind of this low-stress thing, we can just have a good time,’” he said. “We became the men’s number one doubles team, and I remember we had some epic wins.”
Scott particularly enjoyed his AP Literature class with Liane Strub. “Her sister was my eighth-grade teacher, Lynne [Rosenburg], and she was awesome, one of my favorite teachers ever. When I came to M-A, I was really excited to have Strub because I knew Lynne really well,” he said.
During the summer before his sophomore year, Scott traveled to Europe with Strub on a school trip. “That was a highlight of my high school career, because it taught me a lot about being independent. Also I love history, and going to Europe and having my horizons expanded—it was just such an eye-opening experience,” Scott said.
Scott also enjoyed taking ceramics at M-A, a skill he still uses today. “I work in front of a computer all day. So when I’m done, I’m burnt out, I don’t want to look at a screen. For me, ceramics is this therapeutic thing I get to do where I can take something like a blob of Earth, and then I can make it into something with my hands, then produce something physical,” he said.
Following graduation, Scott attended UC Santa Cruz, originally as an undecided major before ultimately choosing economics.
Scott switched into a dual-study program during his sophomore year, focusing on both environmental studies and economics. “I chose econ, and it was going okay, but it was a little bit dry for me, and I wanted a little bit of diversity in my studies,” Scott said. “I ended up taking some environmental studies classes, and those opened up this whole new realm of sustainability and how an economy and environmental stewardship can coexist together.”
In his junior year, Scott studied abroad at the University of Barcelona. “I did the whole year there, which was such an incredible experience,” he said. “At the time, we didn’t have internet in our apartment for a whole year, so it was very much just constantly going out and exploring and really fostering that belief in myself that I could kind of do anything I set my mind to.”
Scott was in Spain during the global financial crisis of 2008, a severe economic collapse triggered by the housing market crash that led to scarce jobs and a worldwide recession. “I probably graduated at one of the worst times ever to graduate from college, because there were no jobs. No one was hiring,” Scott said.
Instead of jumping into the workforce right after college, Scott saved money so he could travel to South America after graduation. “Me and a buddy flew down to Peru, and I backpacked around Peru, Chile, and Brazil for four months, and just had the time of my life. It was ultimate freedom, I made friends, I learned Latin American Spanish, and really fostered independence and more ability to just trust myself and kind of jump into the unknown,” he said. “Out of that trip came a lot of growth. I realized that I wanted to go get more education.”
With this realization, Scott took a week off from his trip to apply to various international business programs. “I wrote all these essays, turned them in, and had my mom proofread them. I had to get them notarized in Santiago, Chile, and print physical copies and send them all the way back to America,” he said. “I put them in the mail, and I forgot about them, and went to travel for two more months.”
“I flew back [to Menlo Park] and then that week I got home, I got accepted into USF,” Scott said.
Scott attended the University of San Francisco for graduate school, participating in a global master’s degree program that took students to Barcelona, Spain, Taipei, Taiwan, and San Francisco over the course of a year. The program focused on globalization in business and how entrepreneurship looks in different countries. “I always figured entrepreneurship was the same as it is in Silicon Valley. What I quickly realized was that Silicon Valley is its own set of ingredients that makes it what it is, whereas in other places, there are so many more barriers to being an entrepreneur,” he said.
After completing the program, Scott began his career with an internship at Salesforce, a software company that provides businesses with a single cloud-based system to manage marketing, sales, and service. At the time, Salesforce was leading the shift in the Bay Area from traditional software that companies had to install onto their computers to software offered already online, ready to use. “It was really one of the most exciting companies to work for in the Bay Area,” he said.
After his internship, Scott transitioned into sales, promoting Salesforce’s services to customers. “I had that job for a few years, and on paper, it was exactly what I had always wanted to do. I always wanted to go work at this big, cool tech company. Then, I quickly became disillusioned with that after about a year and a half, and I actually went to work for a startup,” he said.
A fellow M-A alumnus, Darian Shirazi ’05, was Facebook’s first intern while still in high school and found early success at the company. “He created his own company, and he sent me this message when I was really disillusioned with working at Salesforce, and he’s like, ‘Hey, come work for me.’ So I jumped ship and bailed, and went to work for Darian for a little bit,” Scott said.
Scott served as an account manager for Shirazi’s company, Radius Intelligence, but after about a year, the startup fell through. “For a number of reasons, it just didn’t pan out, and I left that, but there’s so much valuable experience there, working with a bunch of 20-year-olds who had a bunch of venture capital money,” he said. “It was like this dream Silicon Valley life where we had a kegerator and catered lunches and ping-pong tables in the office.”
Scott switched to the technology company Pure Storage at a time when the company hadn’t gone public to investors. “I got to ride this incredible wave, with some amazing leaders of large companies that were successful in Silicon Valley. Through that experience, I got to see what a startup going into a real large public company looked like,” he said.
After three years with Pure Storage, Scott joined Dell EMC, another technology company. “At Dell, I was doing data center stuff, and it was fun, but a lot of my customers were really boring. I was like, ‘Wow, this is okay, but I really want to work with young people who are building cool stuff,’” he said.
At Dell EMC, Scott requested a role working with startups, something Dell hadn’t done before. In his first meeting, he attempted to pitch servers and storage, but he was surprised to learn that everything was already cloud-based. “I probably had six or seven more meetings like that in the next couple of weeks. I was like, ‘I need to go work for a big cloud company,’” he said.
In 2020, Scott began his job at Amazon Web Services (AWS). “I was one of the first hires on the new startup team they had over there. I got to cover a really cool patch of high-growth Bay Area tech startups,” he said. “It was everything I wanted to do. I was talking with founders who were ex-Facebook employees, or had come out of MIT or Stanford and had PhDs, and they were doing the coolest stuff with technology that I’d always wanted to do.”
“I very quickly had this imposter syndrome where I’d be by far the dumbest person in the room,” Scott said. “There’s this saying that you never want to be the smartest person in the room. If you are, you’re in the wrong room, and that sums up that experience for me, because I learned so much from these people.”
With AWS, Scott worked with countless startups, helping them launch their companies. “One of the things I realized for you to be successful in technology is that you can be really smart, but you also have to understand the business side as well. Seeing so many of these startups that had a few ingredients, but they didn’t have it all, and they just didn’t succeed. Through that, I’ve been able to work with hundreds of startups and hundreds of founders and try to help them grow their business and take them to market,” Scott said.
Scott’s four and a half years at AWS coincided with a time of rapid digital expansion in response to the pandemic. “I got to work with some incredible startups through the pandemic era, where there were record amounts of VC funding, because during the pandemic, everything got digitized because no one could go anywhere,” he said.
“At Amazon, the last thing I did was I started to work with AI a lot more. I was working with Anthropic, and helping [companies] go to the market with the adoption of AI for some of the top startups at the time,” Scott said.
In February, Scott got the opportunity to switch to Google, where he currently works, helping companies integrate AI to improve their productivity. “I’ve been here for nine months now, and I work with the most incredible customer base, Lovable, who does vibe coding. I got to go to Sweden this year and hang out with their founders, and I get to work with Anthropic and Google DeepMind, the leading AI people in the industry,” he said.
As Scott has found success in software and AI, his high school experience continues to shape his outlook. “One of the strengths [of M-A] is the diversity in the school,” Scott said. “Having friends from all those spectrums—to this day—even though I work in an environment where I’m working with very privileged people all the time. Recognizing that, especially in this day and age with what’s happening in the country, it’s just so important to empathize and understand other people and understand that, at the end of the day, we’re all in it together. We’re all good people. We have more in common than we don’t, and that’s what M-A taught me.”
Scott’s advice to current M-A students: “You can’t teach having a motor, you can’t teach motivation. I’ve known some amazingly brilliant people that weren’t motivated. On the flip side, I’ve known people that were not the smartest person in the room, but they worked the hardest, and they were the most thoughtful and intentional, and those people are typically the ones that are successful.”
To those interested in pursuing a career in technology: “Don’t be afraid to ask for help. It’s so much easier when you have people that are rooting for you, and that can help you open doors up. We’re in such a fortunate place in the world, living and growing up in Silicon Valley, we’re at the epicenter of that. There are so many companies and opportunities around here.”
