Sky Dayton

Sky Dayton at the Web 2.0 Conference, 2005

Sky Dylan Dayton (born August 8, 1971) is an American entrepreneur. Dayton is the founder of Internet service provider EarthLink,^[1][2][3] co-founder of eCompanies,^[4] and the founder of Boingo.^[5][6]

Early life

Dayton's father was a sculptor, and his mother was a dancer and poet. Shortly after his birth in New York City, the family moved to Los Angeles. He lived for a time with his maternal grandfather, David DeWitt, an IBM Fellow, who played a large part in introducing young Sky to technology.^[4][7]

At the age of 9, Dayton got his first computer, a Sinclair ZX81, which he used to learn programming in BASIC. At age 16, Dayton graduated from The Delphian School, a private boarding school in Oregon, which uses study methods developed by L. Ron Hubbard. He got a job at an entertainment advertising firm where he became exposed to Apple Macintosh hardware. Subsequently, he managed the digital imaging department at the firm. Dayton then moved on to a larger advertising agency, Mednick & Associates, where he held a similar role until he was 18.^[8][9]

Entrepreneurial career

In 1990, 19-year-old Dayton and a friend raised money from family and friends to open Mocha Gallery (later Cafe Mocha), an art gallery and coffee house in Los Angeles.^[4][10][11] While managing Cafe Mocha, Dayton and friend Adam Wicks Walker opened Dayton/Walker Design in 1992, a Studio City advertising and design firm, serving entertainment clients including Fox Television, Disney, Columbia Pictures, Sony Pictures, and Warner Brothers.^[9][12]

In 1993, dayton had difficulties getting his Macintosh computer to access the Internet, and realized that the Internet was likely to become the next mass medium. In an article in Vanity Fair, Dayton described his growing Interest in the business potential which the Internet represented:^[13]

I heard about this thing called the Internet. I thought, That sounds kind of interesting. The first thing I did is I actually picked up the phone and dialed 411, and I said, I’d like the number for the Internet, please. And the operator is like, What? I said, Just search any company with the word Internet in the name. Blank. Nothing. I thought, Wow, this is interesting. What is this thing anyway?

—Sky Dayton

In 1994, Dayton founded EarthLink, an Internet service provider that would offer Internet access to the public.^[14] Kevin O'Donnell, father of a childhood friend, and Reed Slatkin became EarthLink's first financial backers.^[10][11] Other investors followed, including Greg B. Abbott, former AT&T CFO Robert Kavner^[15] and Chip Lacy, and eventually larger investors such as George Soros.^[16]

EarthLink started in an modest office of 600 square feet (56 m²) in Los Angeles, CA. By the summer of 1995, EarthLink made an agreement with UUNET allowing it provide service nationwide. By 1996, the company was growing at a rate of 5 percent to 10 percent a week. Dayton transitioned his title from founding CEO to executive chairman, handing over day-to-day operations of the company to Charles "Garry" Betty. .^[16] A long-time Mac user, Dayton led the creation of a strategic partnership with Steve Jobs at Apple in 1998 that saw EarthLink become the default ISP pre-loaded on the iMac,.^[17] This arrangement led to a $200M investment by Apple in the company.^[18] As a result of its deals with Apple, EarthLink quickly grew to a large-player Internet service provider with millions of customers and over $1 billion in annual revenue.

In June 1999, Dayton's title changed again, this time as non-executive chairman of EarthLink. He formed eCompanies, an incubator and venture capital fund for developing Internet companies, with former Disney Internet chief Jake Winebaum.^[4] A privately held company, eCompanies aunched several successful companies, including LowerMyBills.com, which was purchased by Experian in 2005 for $380M, JAMDAT Mobile, which went public and was then purchased by Electronic Arts in 2005 for $680 million, and Business.com (the domain for which Dayton and Winebaum bought for $7.5M during the height of the dot com bubble), which was purchased by RH Donnelly in 2007 for $345 million.^[19]

In 2001, Dayton started Boingo Wireless to address what he saw as a fragmentation problem inherent in Wi-Fi networks.^[20] Boingo aggregates Wi-Fi “hot spots” around the globe into a single network, and has grown into one of the largest Wi-Fi operators in the world.^[21] Boingo filed for its IPO in January 2011,^[22] listing Dayton as owning 15%.^[23] On May 4, 2011, Boingo Wireless went public selling 5,770,000 shares at $13.50, raising $77.9 million. Dayton served as Boingo's chairman until August, 2014.^[6]

In 2005, Dayton became CEO of Helio. At that time, he resigned as chairman of EarthLink but remained a director. In January 2008 he was appointed Chairman of Helio's Board of Directors for the months leading up to Helio's sale. Helio was acquired by Virgin Mobile USA in 2008.

Dayton is also an investor and board member of semantic web startup Diffbot,^[24] online education company Age of Learning,^[25] and online art marketplace Artsy,^[26] which raised a reported $18.5 million in April, 2014. Dayton said of the art market and company, “only very few people who could afford to buy [art] are doing so. Many are held back by high barriers to entry, which Artsy is solving.”^[27]

Politics and social advocacy

Dayton has identified himself as a libertarian and has listed authors Henry Hazlitt, Frederic Bastiat and Ayn Rand as significant influences, stating, “It never occurred to me to go to the government for a solution. It seems barbaric. A medieval solution to a Net-age problem.”^[28]

In 2011, he co-hosted an event to support then Deputy Mayor and Independent candidate Austin Beutner in the Los Angeles mayoral election, 2013.^[29]

Other activities and awards

Dayton served on the advisory board of the Center for Public Leadership at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.^[30]

He was chosen as Entrepreneur of the Year by the Lloyd Greif Center at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business. He is a recipient of the Dream Keeper award from the I Have a Dream Foundation,^[31] and in 1999 he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35.^[32]

Family and leisure

Dayton is a surfer,^[33] amateur poker player,^[34] and airplane pilot.^[35]

Dayton is married to novelist Arwen Elys Dayton. They are Scientologists and they have three children.^[36][37]

References

Further reading

External links

• Sky Dayton's blog
• Sky Dayton on Twitter

Selected speeches, writings and interviews

• Dueling CEOs talk Wi-Fi (2003) Business Week
• When Capital Corrupts Forbes (2002)
• Education in the Internet Age Speech at Hillsdale College (2003) published in Imprimis