Dan Engel

Last updated
Dan Engel
Dan Engel.png
Born
Daniel Conrad Engel

(1976-06-05) June 5, 1976 (age 48)
The Bronx, New York, U.S.
EducationBachelor of Science in Management in Finance
Alma mater Tulane University
Occupation Entrepreneur
SpouseEmily Anne Engel

Daniel Conrad Engel (born June 5, 1976) is an American CEO and entrepreneur who has worked in the e-commerce and software industries since 1997. Engel led customer acquisition at Picasa, Google, FastSpring, GoToMeeting and GoToMyPC. In 2020, Engel founded Santa Barbara Venture Partners, a venture capital investment fund. [1] He graduated from Tulane University in 1998 with a major in finance and is a past member of Young Presidents' Organization. Engel sits on multiple boards of directors and advisers to tech companies. Since 2018, he has served as board member on a range of local nonprofits that address the critical issue of homelessness. Engel lives in Santa Barbara, California with his two children and his wife, Emily, an environmental activist, art historian, and lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Contents

Career

In 2000, at the age of 24, Engel served as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Idealab, the leading incubator of the dot com era, after having started GrapeApe.com, a consumer e-commerce company, while in college. [2] [3]

From 2002 to 2003, Engel led customer acquisition/revenue generation for GoToMyPC and GoToMeeting software. Revenue growth over the two-year period help lead to a $225M acquisition by Citrix in 2003. [4] [5] In 2014, the Citrix Online division generated over $600 million in revenue as the #3 global SaaS company. [6]

Starting in September 2003, Engel was VP of Market Development at Picasa, a digital photo consumer software company. Engel led Picasa's customer acquisition, marketing and business development initiatives, again significantly boosting revenues. [7]

After Google acquired Picasa in 2004, [8] Engel joined Google and led online customer acquisition/advertising for Google’s AdSense and AdWords products, through Google’s 2004 IPO. [9]

From 2005 to 2013, Engel was CEO and co-founder of FastSpring, an e-payment platform for 3,000+ desktop software and SaaS companies worldwide. [10] [11] Engel grew FastSpring's revenue from zero to over $100 million with $30,000 in total investment. [12] Known for its customer service, FastSpring (acquired 2013 and again in 2018 by Accel-KKR) had a very low annual churn rate of 1.3%. It was the fastest-growing company in the Greater LA area during 2006-2010, according to Deloitte, [13] 13th fastest-growing in N. America during that time, and ranked 41 and 53 on the Inc 500 for 2010 [14] and 2011. [15] While CEO at FastSpring, Engel led corporate sales, marketing and finance. The founders and original investors in FastSpring earned more than a 600-fold return on their original investment. [16]

In 2015, Engel co-founded Mobile1st, serving as its first CEO. The principal product of Mobile1st was Mobilizer Mobile Performance Platform, which enabled companies to manage, monitor, and improve their mobile web page performance across popular mobile devices.[15] [16] Mobile1st now focuses on improving mobile conversion rate for e-commerce companies. [17] [18]

In 2020, Engel launched Santa Barbara Venture Partners (SBVP), a venture capital investment fund that helps its portfolio companies with marketing and customer acquisition. [19] SBVP employs strict guidelines for most companies in which it invests. Those criteria include: the company must have “already conquered product-market fit and [be] generating at least $3 million in annual revenue.” By June 2022, SBVP had invested in nine firms, with its support averaging $850,000 per investment. [20] [21]

In 2024, SBVP employed a strategy for producing profitability for investors far in an advance of any selling of its investments (or “exit”) that might occur in the future. Featured in the Wall Street Journal, the firm's strategy entailed selling either in the secondary market or into a new investment round a small portion of one or more of its already-profitable investments and then returning those profits to investors. [22] For instance, in March of 2024, SBVP sold one tenth of its holdings in Rad AI, a software platform helping automate radiology reports using generative AI. From this early exit, SBVP gained a gross return on investment of 142 percent. [23]

Prior to building start-ups, Engel's business passion was the investment management industry. Starting in high school with Smith Barney, he had a variety of internships. Following Smith Barney, he worked with Sanford C. Bernstein (today Alliance Bernstein), creating their first website. At the age of 19, Engel sought out and learned from legendary investor Philip L. Carret, founder of one of the first mutual funds in 1928. During college, he interned for four years at Merrill Lynch, working along Jim Mangum, a veteran value investor who became his mentor. Later, at Fidelity Investments' Fund Management and Research Company (FMR), Engel worked with some of the industry's investment industry legends, including Ned Johnson, Peter Lynch, William Danoff, and others. [24]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Citrix Systems</span> American software company

Citrix Systems, Inc. is an American multinational cloud computing and virtualization technology company that provides server, application and desktop virtualization, networking, software as a service (SaaS), and cloud computing technologies. Citrix claims that their products are used by over 400,000 clients worldwide, including 99% of the Fortune 100 and 98% of the Fortune 500.

webMethods Enterprise software company, division of Software AG

webMethods was an enterprise software company focused on application integration, business process integration and B2B partner integration. Founded in 1996, the company sold systems for organizations to use web services to connect software applications over the Internet. In 2000, the company stock shares rose over 500% the first day it was publicly traded. In 2007 webMethods was acquired by Software AG for $546 million and was made a subsidiary. By 2010 the webMethods division accounted for almost half of the parent company's revenues. Software AG retained the webMethods name, and uses it as a brand to identify a software suite encompassing process improvement, service-oriented architecture (SOA), IT modernization and business and partner integration.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Salesforce</span> American software company

Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management (CRM) software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, and application development.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">TIBCO Software</span> American enterprise software company

TIBCO Software Inc. is a business unit of Cloud Software Group that provides enterprise software. It has headquarters in Palo Alto and offices in North America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South America.

Wrike, Inc. is an American project management application service provider based in San Jose, California. Wrike also has offices India, Dallas, Tallinn, Nicosia, Dublin, Tokyo, Melbourne, and Prague.

An angel investor is an individual who provides capital to a business or businesses, including startups, usually in exchange for convertible debt or ownership equity. Angel investors often provide support to startups at a very early stage, once or in a consecutive manner, and when most investors are not prepared to back them. In a survey of 150 founders conducted by Wilbur Labs, about 70% of entrepreneurs will face potential business failure, and nearly 66% will face this potential failure within 25 months of launching their company. A small but increasing number of angel investors invest online through equity crowdfunding or organize themselves into angel groups or angel networks to share investment capital and provide advice to their portfolio companies. The number of angel investors has greatly increased since the mid-20th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Accel (company)</span> Venture capital firm

Accel, formerly known as Accel Partners, is an American venture capital firm. Accel works with startups in seed, early and growth-stage investments. The company has offices in Palo Alto, California and San Francisco, California, with additional operating funds in London, India and China.

Flipkart Private Limited is an Indian e-commerce company, headquartered in Bangalore, and incorporated in Singapore as a private limited company. The company initially focused on online book sales before expanding into other product categories such as consumer electronics, fashion, home essentials, groceries, and lifestyle products.

Workday Adaptive Planning, formerly Adaptive Insights, is a software as a service company founded in 2003 and headquartered in Palo Alto, California. The company was acquired by Workday, Inc. in a $1.55 billion deal completed in August 2018.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Similarweb</span> Provider of website rankings and analytics

Similarweb Ltd. is a global software development and data aggregation company specializing in web analytics, web traffic and digital performance. The company has 12 offices worldwide. Similarweb went public on the New York Stock Exchange in May 2021.

Airship is a Portland, Oregon-based company that offers marketing and branding services to its clients. Its services enable businesses to create personalized messages that can be delivered to customers through various channels, such as push notifications and SMS messaging. In addition to messaging services, Airship provides its clients with customer analytics services to help them better understand their customers' behavior and preferences.

Headline, formerly e.ventures and BV Capital, is a global and data-driven venture capital firm investing across stages and sectors, from Direct-to-consumer to Deep tech and Software. It was founded in 1998 in Santa Barbara, California and has since grown to invest in four different regions worldwide: United States, Europe, Asia and Latin America. The firm has its headquarters in San Francisco, California, with additional offices in Berlin and Hamburg, Germany; Paris, France; London, United Kingdom; Tokyo, Japan; Taipei, Taiwan and Sao Paulo, Brazil.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zendesk</span> American customer service software company

Zendesk, Inc. is a Danish-American company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides software-as-a-service products related to customer support, sales, and other customer communications. The company was founded in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2007. Zendesk raised about $86 million in venture capital investments before going public in 2014.

Bright Market, LLC, dba FastSpring, is a software as a service (SaaS) company that offers a full service e-commerce platform for companies that sell software and other online digital products.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gridcentric, Inc.</span> Software company based in Canada

Gridcentric, Inc. was a software company that provided virtualization technology for datacenters. The company's flagship product, Virtual Memory Streaming (VMS) reduced boot time, memory footprint and operating costs for virtual machines in the cloud.

Gagan Biyani is an American of Indian descent serial entrepreneur, marketer, and journalist. He was a co-founder of Udemy, an online education company, and was co-founder and CEO of Sprig, a food delivery company.

Looker Data Sciences, Inc. is an American computer software company headquartered in Santa Cruz, California. It was acquired by Google in 2019 and is now part of the Google Cloud Platform. Looker markets a data exploration and discovery business intelligence platform.

Satish Dharmaraj is an American entrepreneur, speaker, angel investor and venture capitalist, who currently serves as a general partner with Redpoint Ventures. In 2024, he was placed #5 on the Forbes Midas List of top 100 Venture Capital investors. Prior to Redpoint Ventures, Satish Dharmaraj founded Zimbra, which he then sold to Yahoo! for $350 million, in 2007.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AppLovin</span> U.S. information technology company

AppLovin Corporation is an American mobile technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. Founded in 2012, it operated in stealth mode until 2014. AppLovin enables developers of all sizes to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps through its mobile advertising, marketing, and analytics platforms MAX, AppDiscovery, and SparkLabs. AppLovin operates Lion Studios, which works with game developers to promote and publish their mobile games. AppLovin also has large investments in various mobile game publishers. In 2020, 49% of AppLovin's revenue came from businesses using its software and 51% from consumers making in-app purchases.

Auka is a Norwegian, VC-backed financial technology company. Its PSD2 compliant technology platform enables banks to issue white label mobile payments products to their private and merchant customers.

References

  1. ↑ Marc Vartabedian (2024). "Exits Are Few These Days. So One Fledgling VC Firm Created Its Own". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 2024-08-04.
  2. ↑ Mary Hillebrand (1999). "Giant Purple Gorilla Swings into E-Commerce Jungle". Ecommerce Times. Retrieved 2015-10-14.
  3. ↑ Steve Loeb (2022). "Meet Dan Engel, Managing Partner at Santa Barbara Venture Partners". VatorNews. Retrieved 2022-07-12.
  4. ↑ John Greathouse (2016). "This Unicorn Was Built Using 8 Obsolete Marketing Tactics". Forbes. Retrieved 2016-01-10.
  5. ↑ Brandon Fastman (2011). "Fastspring, Onward and Upward". SB Independent. Retrieved 2015-10-14.
  6. ↑ Archana Venkatraman (2014). "Citrix SaaS revenue rises 12%". ComputerWeekly.com. Retrieved 2015-11-04.
  7. ↑ SB Technology Management Program (2015). "Interview with Dan Engel, Serial Entrepreneur". UCTV. Retrieved 2015-10-14.
  8. ↑ Bloomberg News (2004). "Google Buys an Online Photo Manager". NY Times. Retrieved 2015-10-14.
  9. ↑ Franzine Kizner (2008). "Funded by Google". Entrepreneur. Retrieved 2015-10-14.
  10. ↑ Sarah Perez (April 24, 2013). "All-In-One E-Commerce Solution FastSpring Takes Its First Outside Investment From Pylon Capital". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2016-10-16.
  11. ↑ Mixergy (2016). "How Dan Engel Built FastSpring with $30K". Mixergy. Retrieved 2016-05-03.
  12. ↑ John Greathouse (2016). "Corporate Hack: How A Dozen Remote Workers Generated $100M". Forbes. Retrieved 2016-05-05.
  13. ↑ "Deloitte's 2011 Technology Fast 500". Deloitte.Com. 2011. Retrieved 2015-11-04.
  14. ↑ "Inc. 5000 2010: The Full List". Inc Magazine. 2010. Retrieved 2015-11-04.
  15. ↑ "FastSpring on Inc. 500 List of 2011". Inc Magazine. 2011. Retrieved 2015-11-04.
  16. ↑ Stephen Nellis (2013). "Investors jump on FastSpring as revenue soars". Pacific Coast Business Times. Retrieved 2015-10-14.
  17. ↑ Christian Hargrave (October 5, 2016). "Find Common Web Page Display Problems on Mobile Phones". AppDeveloper Magazine. Retrieved 2016-10-17.
  18. ↑ "About Us". Mobile1st. 2015. Retrieved 2015-10-14.
  19. ↑ Marc Vartabedian (2024). "Exits Are Few These Days. So One Fledgling VC Firm Created Its Own". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 2024-08-04.
  20. ↑ Annie Baker (June 6, 2022). "Santa Barbara Venture Partners Closes $11 Million for Fund I". Pulse2.Com. Retrieved 2022-06-25.
  21. ↑ Samson Amore (June 2, 2022). "Meet the New Santa Barbara Venture Fund Eyeing Software Startups". Dot.LA. Retrieved 2022-06-25.
  22. ↑ Marc Vartabedian (2024). "Exits Are Few These Days. So One Fledgling VC Firm Created Its Own". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 2024-08-04.
  23. ↑ Ryan Hibbison (2024). "SBVP turns to secondaries to satisfy LPs' thirst for liquidity". Venture Capital Journal. Retrieved 2024-08-04.
  24. ↑ Mixergy (2011). "FastSpring: Bootstrapped And Profitable". Mixergy. Retrieved 2015-10-14.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.