Ben Walker co-founded Ridgeline after meeting his co-founder Ryan Clinton at West Point and later deploying with him to Iraq, giving him firsthand experience working inside large, complex institutions rather than just funding them—a background he later built on with public-sector crowdsourcing work published through Deloitte. He focuses on helping startups sell into both government agencies and hard-to-reach Fortune 500 companies, and he's pushed for Ridgeline to be based in Memphis and to look for promising companies across the South and industrial belt, arguing that being physically close to overlooked buyers gives him an edge in spotting and winning deals others miss.