1977 - Benjamin Graham Benson was born on February 16, 1977 in Stockholm, Sweden to Noel Manly Felde (now Noel Benson-Bürgi), Carol Wynne Turpen (now Carol Benson) and older sister Rachel Geneve Felde (now Rachel Clark). Both parents were playing in orchestras at the time (mother as a full time sub in the Swedish Radio Orchestra and father a sub for the Opera) before they moved the family to the states to play in the Detroit Symphony.

1983 - Age 5 - Ben's family moved to Pittsburgh where his father became part owner and manager of Kschier Brothers, a stringed instrument restoration and repair shop. At the age of five, Ben also started playing the cello - studying under Van Mastrigt and then a few lessons with Anne Martindale Williams (principle cellist of the Pittsburgh Symphony).

1988 - Age 11 - After his parent's divorce, Ben moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico to live with his mother. Shortly after, Ben rode with his father across the country in a Volkswagen bus from Pittsburgh, to Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, and finally to Albuquerque. Rachel, seven years older, stayed behind to finish her last year of high school.

1990 - Age 13 - Ben received full scholarship to the Albuquerque Academy -- an exclusive private school where tuition is three times the cost of an average university. Though he enjoyed the learning environment, Ben had no vision of college and struggled to keep his grades high enough to maintain the scholarship. Taking a 1.5 hour commute on the city bus also left little time for after school activities or visiting with friends. Eventually a passion for computers (and more specifically computer hacking) replaced his focus on schoolwork.

1993 - Age 16 - By his freshmen year in high school, Ben was teaching multimedia development classes on the first version of Adobe Photoshop/Premier and Hypercard (the hypertext precursor to the Web), writing software for campus computer services and spending his moonlight hours breaking apart the building blocks of the Internet.

1994 - Age 17 - Ben found mentorship from Kevin McCurley (president of the International Association for Cryptologic Research), who provide him access to supercomputers at Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories. Ben's research project titled "A Statistical Analysis of MD5" won national awards and recognition by the Department of Energy. Ben's Uncle, Jon Felde (Law and Justice Committee Director at the National Conference of State Legislatures) was in Washington D.C., to see Ben give his speech in front of members of the Department of Energy.

1995 - Age 18 - Offered a UNIX programming job working for North Sea Consulting in Massachusetts, Ben quit High School just before his senior year and lived with his Uncle Nathan Felde -- a technological visionary. Here, Ben spent every hour of every day focused on software development while surrounded by the energy of Internet elite. Work involved prototyping Internet systems for health care and telecommuniations companies and LAN services support for the interactive yellow pages project "Big Yellow" at NYNEX. During this time, Ben also passed his driver's license test (with one hour of prior instruction from his boss) and bought his first car.

1996 - Age 19 - Under pressure and the need to escape, Ben left Massachusetts in the middle of the worst snow storm in twenty years and headed for California to find new opportunities. Stopping to visit with his father, Ben decided to setup shop in Sedona, Arizona and build an online employment matching service for IT professionals.

1997 - Age 20 - Sprint hires Ben to design the web platform/infrastructure for their Internet dialup service "Sprint Internet Passport". Ben moves to Kansas City, Missouri and overseas the Sprint Internet Passport web platform as well as development of Apple dialup connectivity software.

1998 - Age 21 - Corporate Document Systems, a small Internet startup company, hires Ben to design and develop ePriority® - a secure document distribution service for financial institutions. Over the span of 7 years, Ben grew the service into one of the largest email service providers on the Internet. Epriority was later bought by DST Output - (one of the largest postal mailers in the United States). Sadly, the marketing department of DST Output was not interested in selling a different kind of product to new markets and Ben ended the project with a fizzle - eventually being pushed out of the company by his elected boss (owner of another product).

2000 - Age 23 - A Thursday afternoon idea, Ben develops Spiderline® -- a custom search engine service supporting more than 400 clients ranging from individuals to governmental agencies and Fortune 500 companies. Although companies like Google begin to compete a few years after inception, Spiderline continues to generate significant residual income.

2001 - Age 24 - In what becomes a long-standing relationship, Ben beings training Wing Chun Kung Fu under Master Randy Li (second generation disciple of Yip Man under Ho Kam Ming). For a while, Ben manages the school, forms a company under the name "Wing Chun USA", and develops business processes such as automated billing, enrollment, and recruitment programs. Ben later returns the controls to Randy Li.

2003 - Age 26 - Ben purchases his first home on a treed lake in Shawnee Kansas and spends the next two years renovating. Ben's father moves in for a few months to help with the work... he later returns to Switzerland and marries a woman he met there.

2005 - Age 28 - Formed HT Developing LLC as a subsidiary of Spiderline LLC for the purpose of growing a sales division. Office space in Overland Park, Kansas with modern phone/call management software and equipment. Eventually Ben realized his partner (who he intended to run the division) had a competing vision of the future and incompatible skills prompting Ben to sell the company.

2008 - Age 31 - Ben marries Bo (Lily) Gao, sells his belongings, rents out his house, quits his job and moves to Beijing, China. Turning down a senior management position overseeing DSTi development in Asia, Ben chooses instead to live off Spiderline profits for the next two years and focus on re-energizing his life through study and cultivation of other interests.