Dan Kaplan

Past

• Marketing and Product Manager at VentureBeat
• Writer at VentureBeat
• Co-Founder at Youlicit

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Education

• University of Pennsylvania

Connections

297 connections

Industry

Online Media

Dan Kaplan’s Summary

I had harbored dreams of "The New Yorker," but at some point, I decided the model was doomed. Then I became a tech entrepreneur, started a company and worked on it for around two years.

At the end of those two years, I amicably parted ways with my co-founders and decided to survey the technology landscape before making another entrepreneurial move. As it happened, the opportunity to do exactly this appeared on VentureBeat, Matt Marshall's blog.

As a writer for VentureBeat, I spent most of my time talking to entrepreneurs and VCs, trying to decipher the visions and strategies that separate the start-ups that get traction from those that crash into a wall. I wrote about companies arrayed across digital media, online advertising, and e-commerce, with a bit of artificial intelligence, brain-computer-interfaces and other crazy future-tech mixed in to keep things surreal.

After a year and a half of writing, I moved to the business side of VentureBeat, where I now do business development, product strategy and management and all the other sorts of things one does on the business side of a new media start-up.

Dan Kaplan’s Specialties:

Vision, biz-dev strategy, communication and occasional wit.

Dan Kaplan’s Experience

• Marketing and Product Manager

  VentureBeat

  (Privately Held; Internet industry)

  October 2008 — June 2009 (9 months)

• Writer

  VentureBeat

  (Internet industry)

  April 2007 — September 2008 (1 year 6 months)

  Transitioning from being a tech entrepreneur to writing about tech entrepreneurs was quite meta.
  
  I'd had laser-like focus on recommendation engines at Youlicit and suddenly had to develop the ability to project some degree of knowledge about a little bit of anything in the tech startup world. It was a great way to survey the scene, meet passionate and occasionally brilliant people and learn like mad.
  
  Also: Deadlines, deadlines, and deadlines, plus the need to filter the plausible ideas from the doomed ones in the blink of an email.

• Co-Founder

  Youlicit

  (Internet industry)

  August 2005 — August 2007 (2 years 1 month)

Dan Kaplan’s Education

• University of Pennsylvania

  B/A , History

Additional Information

Dan Kaplan’s Interests:

Consumer internet, next-generation online advertising, personalization, venture capital, mobile, Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, nanotechnology,

Dan Kaplan’s Groups:

•    University of Pennsylvania Alumni
•    Metaverse Meetup

Dan Kaplan’s Honors:

Nora Magid Award For Non-Fiction Writing, 2003

Dan Kaplan’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

• new ventures
• job inquiries
• expertise requests
• business deals
• reference requests
• getting back in touch