Bio
I know I need a three sentence blurb, but for now you can just judge me by how I spend my time.
Twilio
I joined Twilio in March 2009 as their first employee to help bring our cloud communications APIs to market. My mission has always been to cultivate and engage with rapidly growing developer community. I moved from Seattle to the Bay Area in January 2010 (TechFlash writeup). Early on I served as a jack of all trades, travelling around the country talking to developers, writing blog posts, producing videos, and figuring out how to build a healthy funnel for customer acquisition. These days I’m fulfilling a more traditional Director of Marketing role, building out a team, scaling support and content generation, and helping take our product adoption and penetration into various markets to the next level. Drop me a note at danielle@twilio.com if you’re interested in doing business together.
I’ve also found opportunities to learn to code and have launched projects like TweetToCall and EscapeMyDate, which both use the Twilio platform. Twilio tooks Series A venture financing in December 2009 from Union Square Ventures, and is also backed by Dave McClure, Mitch Kapor, Manu Kumar, David Cohen, Chris Sacca and other awesome angel investors and advisors.
Startup Weekend
I love Startup Weekend, and now I’m on the Board of Advisors! Startup Weekend brings together aspiring entrepreneurs for 54 intense hours of creating a company from scratch. It all begins on Friday night with pitches, and ends Sunday night with demos. For anyone considering doing a startup, this is a MUST DO event. Probably one of the best ways I can imagine spending a weekend.
Seattle 2.0
Until the spring of 2009 I lived in Seattle, where I was Editor in Chief for Seattle 2.0, a local resource for entrepreneurs and I am looking to expand the same community-minded services to the Bay Area and beyond in the future. I joined Seattle 2.0 in October 2008 as Events Editors, and became Editor in Chief in March 2009. Seattle 2.0 is published by Marcelo Calbucci, and is now run by CEO Jennifer Cabala. Much love to the Seattle 2.0 team, you can still catch guest posts from me on there from time to time.
I’m most proud of launching Seattle 2.0 TV in the winter of 2008 with Brian Westbrook and Shauna Causey. We introduced live streaming video and interviews to local tech events, speaking with awesome startup creators, community members and pundits including Michael Arrington (TechCrunch), Brad Feld (TechStars), Brady Forrest (O’Reilly), Glenn Kelman (Redfin), Jonathan Sposato (Picnik), and hundreds of others.
Whrrl (created by Pelago)
I joined my first startup, Pelago, in September 2007 — I’m forever grateful to Blake Scholl, the first employee there, for introducing me to this crazy world. Whrrl is a location based social network, which is moving in the social games direction these days. I started out as a data monkey and wound up community manager and the face of Whrrl to the press through some fun and random “accidents” including interviews with the press following the launch of the iPhone app store, where we were a partner. I was at the company for the launch of Whrrl to the public, and helped with the go-to-market for the company’s first pivot with Whrrl 2.0
Pelago is backed by leading venture firms such as Kleiner Perkins, Trilogy, T-Venture, Bezos Expeditions, DAG and Reliance Entertainment
Working for Myself
Social Kind
Before joining Twilio, I was briefly self-employed as a consultant working with web development, livestream broadcasting, and experimenting with applying social media to marketing and other business needs. During that time I formed a holding company for these projects: Social Kind, which is now run by my husband Kevin and specializes in building applications on the Twilio platform in the healthcare, finance, and enterprise space.
Working with Fortune 500
Expeditors International
An argument within the family business about how much I was being paid ($15/hour) lead to a challenge – if I could land a job that paid more than I was currently making, then my Dad would give me a raise. I bought my first suit and headed straight to the offices of Expeditors International, Reliant’s first customer, and landed a job as an intern… for $9/hour. Three months later I was promoted to full time customer service representative, where I was instrumental in the turn-around of an unprofitable team. After the turnaround, I was promoted to Business Process Analyst where I got to spend all my time coming up with ways to save the company time and money, and then implementing them. Needless to say, I was making a fair bit more than $15/hour and had found a my passion for helping people be more productive.
Dropping Out of College
Olympic Community College – Bremerton, WA
I attended from September 2003 to March 2005 and then took a quarter off to do an internship at Expediors. The internship became a full time job and I never looked back.
Work with the Family Business
Reliant Consulting & Research
The company was founded by my father following several failed financial service startups where he had been co-founder or employee. In my household I knew a thing or two about the stress of teaching a fledgling company to fly. Following its founding in 1998, the consulting firm quickly took off, and I helped my Dad with automating grunt work (Excel macros and Visual Basic) and generated fiduciary documentation that is sent to hundreds of thousands of 401(k) plan participants each month. He had always worked very long hours, so I didn’t really know him until I worked for him. At first we shared an office so small that we sat at the same huge oak desk bumping elbows. The business still operates today with over $3 Billion in assets under advisory.
Work Before College
From doing jobs off the “price list” I had my mom create to paying for my riding lessons as a stable hand (yes, I literally shoveled shit at 5am). Receptionist, cashier, McDonald’s crew member, tennis instructor, you name it – I loved to work. If I could have picked working over going to school I would have. Web design and development with Macromedia Dreamweaver – sure (visit DiscoverLavender.com – the first site I launched for a client).
Life Beyond Work
When I’m in Washington I live and work from our beautiful Cape Cod style house Kirkland with my husband Kevin, best friend D’Laina and sister-in-law Jill . When I’m in San Francisco I live in Potrero Hill with my fabulous roommates Katrina and Michael, with our peek-a-boo view of the Bay Bridge. I work at Pier 38 near AT&T park.
