WILLIAM A. BENJAMIN

A successful electronic publisher and management consultant/entrepreneur with over 35 years of startup management experience, Bill Benjamin founded or co-managed eight different information-based companies, six of which were acquired over time by large media corporations.

He began his career at McGraw-Hill, spending seven years in various marketing and editorial assignments. Benjamin then founded his first publishing company, W. A. Benjamin, Inc., which became a leading specialist in science textbooks and monographs and numbered over 20 Nobel Prize winners among its authors. The first academic publisher to offer stock options to its authors, editors and advisors, the Company was taken public in an IPO underwritten by White Weld. It was merged with Addison-Wesley and Pearson, and is now Benjamin Cummings Publishing.

EUROPEAN STARTUP

Moving to Europe, Benjamin founded in Paris, France, The Center For Business Information which provided both M&A and competitive analysis research services to a number of American and French companies.  He and his colleagues compiled “The Directory of European Business Information Sources,” (Harper & Row) which became one of the standard reference guides on the subject.

Returning to Boston, Benjamin was appointed electronic publishing consultant to the Harvard Business Review and was responsible for the design and production of their full-text database. Benjamin then moved into business database publishing and founded the Business Research Corporation that produced both INVESTEXT and FIRST CALL, two of the premier investment analysis databases that were subsequently acquired by Thomson Financial. The venture capital funding of this company is the subject of the Harvard Business School case study written by Professor William Sahlman.

CALIFORNIA STARTUPS

Later, Benjamin moved to California where he started and managed the American Database Corporation (consumer data analysis) that was merged with the Fielding Corporation. He next served as Executive VP and financial consultant to Online Interactive, a pioneer in the direct, download delivery of business software that was subsequently merged into Microwarehouse. He then wrote the business plan for, and co-founded, the Internet Learning Corporation (online management training) which was merged in 2002 with the Australian Training Company, A.S.K. 

In his latest venture, Benchmark Metrics, Benjamin worked with analytical tool experts in some of the leading graduate business schools including Stanford, Berkeley, NYU, Duke, UCLA and Wharton to design and produce innovative business tools in finance and marketing and deliver the software as a service.  Despite early favorable reviews of the business model, BMI was unable to survive the 2008 economic meltdown and operations were suspended last September.

EDITOR AND PUBLISHER

Throughout his business career, Bill Benjamin has served as an electronic publishing consultant and acquisition advisor to a number of business data companies and publishers including McGraw-Hill, Thomson, EBSCO, Inc. Magazine, the Harvard Business Review, Harper & Row, Italian Department of Commerce, French Ministry of Education, Whitaker Corporation, CSC, and Champion International. Between consulting gigs, he edited and published with Doubleday and American Airlines a series of destination travel guides, and a business travel guide with The Los Angeles Times.  Benjamin was also the editor of a  seven-volume series of business research guides for Thomson Learning (The Business Research Solutions Series) that covered online business research sources and services in finance, marketing, corporate data, legal data, investment analysis and competitive analysis.

Outside the office, Bill Benjamin has been a Director and Board Member of 12 for-profit companies and four non-profit groups, including two years as part-time Executive Director of a venture capital organization, The Central Coast Venture Forum, which helps California Central Coast entrepreneurs evaluate and fund their business plans.  Bill has also served on the Business Plan Competition committee at the UCLA Anderson School of Business. He currently works as a venture development consultant to three Southern California companies and as an ad hoc consultant to entrepreneurs via his website, VentureCritical.com.