Hi, I'm Dan.

I'm the product and marketing side of small software companies: the idea, the concept, the campaign, and whatever else needs doing. Right now that's Schoolcase, which takes the flood of school and activity emails parents get every day and turns it into something you can actually act on.

I was born in Scotland and lived there until I was nine, when my family emigrated to Massachusetts in the mid-80s. I studied at UMass Amherst, moved to Colorado in 2003, and have called it home ever since, with detours to work in New Zealand and San Francisco along the way. The foothills above Boulder are where I landed for good.

I've been building companies for about 25 years. I co-founded Good Apples, a brand and design agency that picked up a few awards before it was acqui-hired in 2018. Before that I co-founded Hilite, an early Web 2.0 content curation site. Pentatonic.Co is home base for my consultancy and ventures. In between, I spent several years at a mobile accessories manufacturer where I took over a licensing program that was in rough shape, got it back on track, and grew it into a multimillion-dollar business. The thread through all of it is product strategy: figuring out what something should be and who it's for.

I'm a single dad to two kids. One just started college, the other is in 8th grade and at 13 is already my height. Most of what I know about school communication chaos I learned firsthand.

These days you'll find me working on Schoolcase out of Roost, my favorite coworking space in Boulder.

Cheers,
Dan