Dan Porter

Background

About Dan Porter

Faber est suae quisque fortunae” I spent the first 8 years of my career working in education, first as a public school teacher and then in educational non profit. Ultimately after some twists and turns and almost graduate degrees (admitted and never went - actually did get a masters in 19th century Mexican history) instead changed course to build a peripatetic career trying to start companies. That is a classy way of saying I basically had no plan, limited direction and it took me about ten years out of school to finally figure out what I wanted to do in life. It wasn't like I had a big revelation or anything. It was more about leveraging my unique skill set: the ability to spin good yarns, a constant curiosity, poor grapho-motor skills, a love of Kombucha and a desire to wear sneakers. Actually now I'm more into Persian yogurt than Kombucha. So here's some stuff that I did in the process: I made three #1 apps. Why does this amuse me? Because I still remember the first time I used a cell phone. It was as big as a football and had a special suitcase it came in. The biggest app was Draw Something. The game has well over 250 million downloads and is one of the most downloaded games ever in the history of the iPhone. We sold OMGPOP to Zynga for $180 million. Before I sold OMGPOP I also sold my first start up TicketWeb to IAC. To show you my impressive streak, it was twelve years between those two events. I also worked for Richard Branson at Virgin. That was fun. And way back in the beginning I was on the first team to build Teach For America and I eventually became the President of Teach For America. And then there were those three years as a Hollywood super agent at WME. That was random. How did I do it all you ask? Mostly luck, combined with vegetarian living, catching on to TV shows three seasons after everyone else, cheering for losing sports teams (go Eagles)(EDIT- Super Bowl Champs!), and a complete and utter inability to ever assemble a toy given to my kids (not they are basically grown up so that's less relevant). One last thing: everything about business I learned from The Wire.