Educated Guess Ventures is a family enterprise in the oldest sense: for five generations, the Miller and Saben families have built businesses together — every generation a partnership, every venture funded with the same three things. Our ideas. Our time. Our capital.
Every big decision is a guess. For five generations, this family has made educated ones — investing our ideas, our time, and our capital in every venture, together.
Max Miller · Lewiston, Maine
The story starts with our great-grandfather Max Miller, who with Isaac Miller founded the Isaac Miller & Max Miller Company — a scrap-metal yard that found its purpose supplying the United States through two World Wars. The first family lesson was set here: find where the future is being built, and do the work.
Herbert & Frances Miller · Miller Industries
Our grandfather Herbert and grandmother Frances turned metal into textiles — building Miller Industries into a manufacturer of 2,500 people across 11 New England facilities at its peak. The mills wove two things at once: cloth, and the economic fabric of eleven towns. And the family's Worumbo Mill earned an unlikely footnote in American letters — its most famous shift worker, a 19-year-old named Stephen King, turned a mill paycheck into an American imagination.
Deborah & Charles Saben
Our mother and father, Deborah and Charles Saben, carried the enterprise into new industries — founding Miller Hydro Group in renewable energy decades before it was fashionable, generating 19.4 megawatts of clean power until its successful exit in 2011, while Deborah led the family into commercial real estate, including 80,000 square feet that today forms part of Maine Medical Center. A generation of diversification, run — as always — as a partnership.
Dave & Margy Saben
We are the fourth generation, and Educated Guess Ventures is our chapter: education, technology, and health — the industries building this era's future. Margy architected the enrollment and operations discipline; Dave built the software and the frameworks. Like every generation before us, we work as partners — same table, same stakes, same three investments: ideas, time, and capital.
Dylan, Ana & Nyla
And the thread continues. Our children — Dylan, Ana, and Nyla — are growing up the way we did: around the table where the family's next educated guesses get made. The looms are gone. The thread is unbroken.
Every generation invested the same three things: ideas, time, and capital. The industries changed — metal, textiles, power, real estate, education technology. The partnership never did.
Eyes on Data. Ears on People.
The decision-intelligence philosophy behind every EGV framework and engagement: rigorous evidence balanced by genuine understanding of the people who create it. Published as a book by Dave Saben.
"Eyes on Data, Ears on People" isn't a slogan we wrote for a website — it's how you run a mill floor, a dam, and a classroom technology company alike: rigorous about the numbers, because people's livelihoods ride on them.
It's how this family has always worked: rigorous about the numbers, because the people around the table are the point.
KEY FACTS
- FOUNDED LINEAGE
- 1905
- GENERATIONS
- 5
- SUCCESSFUL EXITS
- 4
- YEARS OF FAMILY ENTREPRENEURISM
- 115+
- TODAY
- Educated Guess Ventures, Venice, FL
- The partners and the Experience Map — where we have operated, invested, and advised.
- Eyes on Data, Ears on People — the decision-intelligence philosophy behind every EGV framework.
- Portfolio and results — the companies and engagements that continue the thread.