Product manager and designer · Cornell ’28
I build AI products that keep a person in the loop.
Looking for a product management or product design internship for Summer 2027.
enter the storySee the work
Hi, I’m Ben Jordan, a product manager and designer. I build AI products that keep a person in the loop: the model hands anything it isn’t sure of to that person instead of guessing. I’ve worked that way on IBM’s webMethods integration platform, at a Y Combinator company I co-founded and in a Cornell lab that works with Anthropic Research.
Looking for a product management or product design internship for Summer 2027.
It started at sixteen, with vintage clothes: I ran Hillside Trends alone, around school, across five storefronts.
In the summer of 2025 I joined Ventura as its second person. Orders reached distributors as faxes, spreadsheets and the odd napkin; I decided nothing would go into their ordering system until a person cleared every line our agent flagged.
The next summer I was the first test user of FlowPilot, an IBM prototype that turns plain English into a working integration. Two weeks in, I told my manager I couldn’t say what I was adding. He gave it one more week. That week I found the platform’s buried rules for building flows. Then I walked the senior product managers through the legacy platform, and FlowPilot became a top priority.
Now, at Cornell’s Future of Learning Lab, I design the path that gets a nervous first-timer into a live call with AI coworkers. They jumped in at mid-thought pauses; I fixed that, and false cut-offs in the live test set fell from 22 percent to zero.
Outside of work I lead an eight-person studio making Flikr, a game where you play a lamp. I build tools for drummers because I am one. Otherwise I’m probably on a trail, running for longer than is reasonable.
I grew up in Wellsville, New York; the scene behind these words is home.
Leadership
Pick a row for the story behind it.
8 people on the team
2026 to now
I co-founded the studio and make the scope calls; the hard part is saying no to good ideas from people I like. Flikr showed at Cornell’s 2026 game design showcase and is headed for Steam.
See the project →100 to 200 guests every week
February 2025 to now
Every week I run Startup Hours: 100 to 200 founders, investors and executives in one room, including people from Toyota and Anduril.
about $600,000 closed in three months
2025
I joined before there was a product. Testing every subject line and channel of our cold outreach got 10 percent of the people we reached to answer, against the usual 1 to 2 percent.
Case study →more than $100,000 in revenue
2022 to 2025
I resold vintage clothing on five storefronts, more than 600 orders in all, on systems I built to run them alone. My sales data picked the next buy and pulled me toward limited-run luxury tees, where the margin was.
Case study →2 World Championship qualifications
2022 to 2024
I led the team’s engineering as its captain, and we qualified for the World Championship twice.
Experiment flew to the International Space Station
2021 to 2023
At sixteen I sent a bacterial-resistance experiment to the International Space Station on a Falcon 9. It’s still the strangest sentence I get to say about high school.
Skills
Pick a skill and the till prints where I used it.
Roadmaps and product strategy
Ran product at Ventura from an idea to 15 paying distributors, and dropped any idea a distributor could rule out in one call.
See it in the Ventura case studyEducation
Two degrees at once: how people use information, and how businesses run.
Coursework
Click or tap any card for its description.Click any card for its description, or toss the lot.
AEM 2010 · Spring 2025
Hillside’s improvised models, rebuilt properly.
Business
Decision models in Excel, built so another person can open and follow them.
AEM 2420 · Spring 2025
Business
Segmentation, targeting and positioning, and the research that tells you whether a message landed, applied to a real brand over a semester.
AEM 2700 · Spring 2025
Business
Memos, decks and the talks that go with them, plus difficult conversations, workshopped in front of the room and then revised.
AEM 2100 · Fall 2025
Business
Hypothesis tests and regression, taught for reading a result rather than computing it. I reach for it every time an A/B test comes back.
INFO 2450 · Fall 2025
Computing and information science
How communication technology shapes the way people relate, work and organize.
AEM 2601 · Spring 2026
Business
Why some firms outperform others: industry analysis, competitive advantage, and how a strategy plays out over time, through cases.
CS 1110 · Spring 2026
Computing and information science
Python, from functions to classes and recursion, and the discipline of writing code someone else can read.
INFO 3152 · Spring 2026
Where Flikr started.
Computing and information science
A semester-long studio: a team designs, prototypes and ships a game, through playtesting to a public showcase. My studio is now taking Flikr to Steam.
AEM 3255 · Fall 2026
Business
Forty-eight hours in a team, taking a problem from idea to pitch: customer discovery, a scrappy prototype and the presentation.
INFO 1300 · Fall 2026
Computing and information science
Building for the web from scratch: HTML and CSS, responsive layout and accessibility, over a series of sites.
INFO 2950 · Fall 2026
Computing and information science
Real data, end to end in Python, drawing inferences only as far as the dataset supports.
NBA 5070 · Fall 2026
Business
How a technical idea becomes a company, for people coming from science and engineering: customer discovery, business models and raising capital.
Hey, I’m AI Ben. Office hours are open: pick a question or type your own.
Written by me, as of September 2026. Nothing you type is stored.
A one-time download of a few hundred megabytes; it runs on your device.
