Ben Bakken

Ben is former Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Bangstate Inc. Ben has served as Head of Application Development at Allston Trading, overseeing hundreds of millions of dollars in the market daily. He has previously served as Director of Engineering for Samsung SmartThings, leading backend development during the build of largest consumer IoT release ever. Previously, he was Backend Services Manager for Redbrick Health, overseeing 85x user growth, continued revenue growth, and 5x team expansion in just under 2 years.

Clark torgerson

Clark served as Senior Manager, Linux Systems Engineering at SpaceX, designing, implementing, and managing flight-critical and R&D systems for Falcon Heavy, Falcon 9, Dragon, and StarLink missions. He also served as Director of Production Engineering at Samsung SmartThings, overseeing systems architecture, deployment, and launch of a worldwide Internet-of-Things platform. Previously, he served as Director of Platform Systems at Redbrick Health and as Senior Production Linux Team Lead at ABILITY Network, helping build and launch a nationwide, next-gen healthcare and insurance data exchange platform.

JD Rubin

JD has been practicing law since 2003 and uses his experience to provide legal and commercial support to ScoreSide. He started his career in private practice at the Chicago law firm of Barrack Ferrazzano, where he specialized in corporate and securities law to clients in a wide range of industries. JD has spent the majority of his career working hand-in-hand with business leaders as an in-house attorney with a focus on renewable energy. He’s been a team member for the legal team of a $7B international conglomerate, and has also served as General Counsel for a $200M public company, where he built the legal department from the ground up in a start-up environment. JD holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a law degree from Northwestern University School of Law.

CJ Sapong

CJ Sapong is ScoreSide’s first Athlete Ambassador. In this role, we will lean on CJ’s experience as a professional athlete and knowledge of the landscape to continue to strengthen our collaborative approach to creating charitable campaigns around statistics in sport. ScoreSide is privileged to be joining forces with a strong ally in professional athletics that will add valuable insight to our current operations and assist us in creating new opportunities for athletes and their communities to engage with our platform and allocate resources to charitable organizations that impact lives.

CJ is currently a professional soccer player for Nashville SC of Major League Soccer. Sapong is originally from Manassas, Virginia and played college soccer for James Madison University, where he received numerous conference, regional, and national accolades. CJ was drafted in the first round of the 2011 MLS SuperDraft to Sporting Kansas City. 10 seasons, 276 MLS appearances, 71 goals & 25 assists later, CJ has become a staple in the league and won MLS Rookie of the Year (2011), Lamar Hunt US Open Cup (2012) & MLS Cup 2013 during his stints with Sporting KC, Philadelphia Union & Chicago Fire.

CJ is the founder of Sacred Seeds, a non-profit organization that creates programming and resources to expose underprivileged communities to the power of self-sustaining agriculture and the importance of nutrition to the body’s essential functions. Sapong also currently serves as an executive board member for the Black Players for Change (BPC), a coalition of MLS players of color galvanized to bring attention and impact to grassroots communities and help lower barriers to entry in the game of soccer. In addition to his work in the non-profit world and his desire to help the next generation of professional athletes, CJ is a serial entrepreneur with investments in multiple startup technology companies.