Ben Slivka

Ben is an advisor, inventor, philanthropist, and software engineer with a passion for learning. He has active “angel” investments in 14 companies in biotechnology, hardware, software, and space launch.

Ben spent 14 years at Microsoft, where he worked on OS/2, MS-DOS 6, Windows 95, a Java VM, and MSN. He started the Internet Explorer team in 1994 and led it through the release of IE3.0 in 1996. IE 3.0 beat Netscape 3.0 in press reviews and achieved 30% market share by the time IE 4.0 released in 1997. Ben installed Microsoft’s first production LAN in 1985, proposed the FAT32 file system in 1990, led the team that wrote the Win32 API specification in 1991, and created the CAB software distribution format in 1993. His work at Microsoft and Dreambox Learning resulted in 22 issued U.S. patents. Ben also worked brief stints at Amazon and IBM.

Ben earned B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science and a B.S. degree in Applied Mathematics in the early 1980’s from Northwestern University, where he served as a Trustee from 1998 to 2018.