Salem, Oregon · Est. 2026

Hard-won insight.
Plainly delivered.
No polite fictions.

Ben Pickett brings 25 years of enterprise-scale experience to the keynote stage, the boardroom, and the market. Without the hype.

Start a Conversation → About Ben

Pickett Ventures LLC

Speaking & Advisory Keynotes, workshops, board advisory

AI & Technology Practical AI implementation for SMB & mid-market

Strategic Consulting Bespoke advisory for founders & executives

Investment Management Systematic, multi-signal approach across public markets

Accepting new engagements · Salem, OR

Ben Pickett

Founder & Managing Member

Investment AI Strategy Operations Falconry Nike Alumni

25+Yrs Experience

1K+Stores via SRE

MayorJefferson, OR

5Keynote Topics

Founder

Two decades building.
Now charting my own.

Ben Pickett is an investor, strategist, and speaker with 25+ years of experience building and operating complex systems at scale. He has led SRE across more than 1,000 retail locations at Nike, co-founded an AI company, and served his community as an elected Mayor. He has led global teams, stood up multi-hundred-million-dollar programs, and spent years learning what actually separates the ideas that compound from the ones that plateau.

Pickett Ventures is the vehicle for what comes next: a fully independent, multi-platform firm operating across speaking, AI implementation, strategic consulting, and systematic investing. No external bosses. No polite fictions. Own the work.

"The best opportunities are where the crowd is wrong and you can prove it. The edge isn't philosophy; it's operational."

Outside the firm, Ben is a licensed raptor propagator (Harris Hawks and Falcon Hybrids), a photographer, and an avid outdoorsman based in Salem, Oregon, where Hunting Hawks operates as the falconry side of the operation.

Visit benpickett.com →

The Thesis

The edge is operational,
not philosophical.

Conviction over consensus.

The best opportunities live where the crowd is wrong and you can prove it. That takes independent thinking and the willingness to be early.

Asymmetry over certainty.

Find positions where the upside dramatically outweighs the downside. In trading, consulting, and client selection.

Precision over volume.

Fewer, better decisions, in markets and in the room. The right analysis at the right time moves more than a hundred meetings.

Ideas compound too.

Capital compounds. So does knowledge. The right thinking, delivered to the right room at the right time, creates lasting returns.

Four Platforms

Four platforms.
One operating thesis.

Speaking & Advisory

Five developed keynote topics at the intersection of AI, leadership, and asymmetric thinking. Available for corporate events, executive summits, and board advisory engagements. Full speaker profile at benpickett.com.

Keynotes & workshops · Contact for availability & fees

AI & Technology

Practical AI implementation for businesses that need results, not presentations. From agentic workflows and custom tooling to full deployment, targeting SMB and mid-market clients ready to move.

Project-based · No fluff, no pilot theater

Strategic Consulting

Bespoke advisory for founders and executives, plus a specialty most consultants cannot claim. I ran quality engineering, reliability, and performance at Fortune 100 scale. For software vendors in testing, QA, data, and DevOps I bring the buyer's seat: sharpen the product, solve real customer-engagement problems, and train your field teams on the selling points technical buyers actually act on.

Founders, executives & software vendors · Project-based and retainer

Investment Management

Systematic, multi-signal approach to public markets, combining quantitative research, macroeconomic positioning, and disciplined risk management.

Systematic, multi-signal · Contact for structure details

For Software Vendors

I was your buyer.
Now I help you sell.

If you sell testing, QA, data, or DevOps software, I ran exactly what you sell, at Fortune 100 scale. I know what technical buyers actually need, where deals stall, and how to make a field team sound like they have lived it. Three ways I help.

Product & Roadmap

Direction from the buyer's seat. Where the product wins, where it loses, and what the next technical buyer will actually pay for.

Customer Engagement

Real problem-solutioning with your strategic accounts. I speak the buyer's language because I was the buyer, so the conversation moves from demo to deployment.

Sales Enablement

Train your field teams on the selling points technical buyers act on, not the feature list. The narrative that turns a pilot into a purchase.

Proof, not theory. At Fortune 100 scale I built a self-service pre-production refresh that put continuous delivery in every team's hands; a service-virtualization and performance-testing center of excellence for developer and test-data enablement that teams adopted so widely it often ran near a billion transactions a month before production; and a contract-driven framework that generated test data and mocks from API contracts, so teams could build and test against them before the application code even existed.

What People Say

Heard from the
people in the room.

Ben Pickett delivering a keynote at the Perforce Delphix SoCal User Group, May 2026

Keynote · Perforce Delphix SoCal User Group · May 2026

★★★★★

"I've worked with hundreds of enterprise executives over a 20-year career, and I can count on one hand the people who can walk into a room full of salespeople and genuinely electrify them. Ben Pickett is one of those people. He made a room full of hardened enterprise sales professionals lean forward in their seats, laugh out loud, and walk away remembering exactly why what we do matters. That speech is still talked about. Years later, people from that kickoff still bring it up. If you're looking for a keynote speaker, a thought leader, or someone to represent your brand on stage, Ben Pickett is the real thing."

Dave Best

Vice President, SustainableIT.org

★★★★★

"I've worked with Ben across vendor partnerships and speaking engagements for nearly a decade. When I brought him in to speak at an invitation-only DevOps workshop for CTO-level executives in Hawaii, he delivered exactly what that audience needed: no theory, no filler, just hard-earned perspective from someone who had lived it at global scale. He was the person everyone wanted to keep talking to when it was over. There is no one I would recommend more confidently for a senior technology audience."

J. Damian Vitale

Regional Sales Manager, Silicon Valley & Hawaii, Perforce Delphix

Ways to Work Together

Three ways to
engage Pickett Ventures.

Advisory Retainer

Monthly engagement for founders and executive teams that need a senior strategic mind on call, without a full-time hire. Bespoke scope, direct access.

Inquire →

Project Engagement

Defined-scope projects across strategy, AI implementation, and go-to-market. Clear deliverables, fixed timelines, no scope creep. Done right the first time.

Inquire →

Speaking & Keynotes

Ben speaks at executive summits, corporate events, and leadership programs on AI strategy, asymmetric thinking, and operating at scale. Five fully developed keynote topics available. See the full topic list and speaker profile at benpickett.com.

Speaker profile → Book Ben →

Get in Touch

Let's find the
right fit.

Whether you're looking for a strategic advisor, a speaker, or an AI implementation partner, the first conversation is always the right place to start.

pickettventures.ai

Pacific Northwest, United States

Send a Message

✓

Message received.

I'll be in touch within one business day.

Hard-won insight.
Plainly delivered.
No polite fictions.

Two decades building.
Now charting my own.