Andrew Benton
Co-founder And CEO at Riza
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAndrew Benton is a seasoned founder and engineering leader with 16 years of experience building and scaling developer-focused products from startup to ops roles, currently serving as Co-founder and CEO of Riza in San Francisco. He blends hands-on backend engineering—contributing to notable open-source projects like sqlc (type-safe SQL codegen) and twilio-ruby—with executive experience as COO of ngrok and founder/CEO of Charge. Comfortable moving between product, architecture, and operations, he has a track record of removing technical debt, shipping reliable remote execution features, and improving developer ergonomics. A BA in Mathematics from UPenn and an MA in Economics from Princeton underpin a pragmatic, data-informed approach to product decisions and hiring. Notably, he enjoys telling people when not to start certain businesses, reflecting a candid mix of startup optimism and hard-won skepticism.
16 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
MA, Economics, MA, Economics at Princeton UniversityBA, Mathematics, BA, Mathematics at University of Pennsylvania
Stackoverflow
499reputation
20kreached
6answers
3questions
twilio
top-5%
Github Skills (20)
postgresql10
twilio-api10
ruby10
code-generation10
go10
sql10
twilio10
tml9
apidoc9
sqlite9
api9
database-design8
testing8
mysql8
json7
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
twilio/twilio-ruby
Aug 2010 - Jul 2013
A Ruby gem for communicating with the Twilio API and generating TwiML
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:165 commits in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Andrew primarily contributed to the development and maintenance of the twilio-ruby gem. Their work involved bumping the API version and modifying example code. Further contributions included bug fixes in the SMS messages functionality and refactoring. Additionally, they were involved in upgrading dependencies and implementing features like the refresh method on instance resources.
apiruby-gemtwimltwiliosms
sqlc-dev/sqlc
Apr 2020 - Mar 2025
Generate type-safe code from SQL
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:91 reviews, 147 PRs, 150 pushes in 5 years
Contributions summary:Andrew contributed to the `sqlc-dev/sqlc` repository, which focuses on generating type-safe code from SQL. Their commits involved fixing bugs related to type overrides, preventing panics in variadic function handling, and incorporating features for remote code generation. The user also focused on improving the codebase by removing dependencies, refactoring file formatting, and supporting new functionalities like user-id/password authentication for remote execution and handling untyped SQLite columns.
sql-generationpythonmysqlsqlcode-generator
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