About

I’m Dan, a product leader and entrepreneur originally from Birmingham in the UK and now living in Hackney with my partner, son and daughter.

I studied Politics and Economics at the University of Manchester before moving to London in 2006.

In 2008, along with Duncan Jennings, Max Jennings and Richard Foister I founded VoucherCodes which grew into Europe’s largest online coupon business. In 2011 VoucherCodes was sold to RetailMeNot, Inc. of Austin Texas where I took on responsibility for product management for all of their European businesses. RetailMeNot had its IPO on the NASDAQ in the summer of July 2013.

In 2015 the same team launched Hoop, a platform that connected families with local activity organisers. Hoop was twice voted an ‘App of the Year’ by Apple. It was installed over 1.5M times and its tools were used by over 5,000 small businesses to manage schedules, handle bookings and take payment. Hoop was closed in the summer of 2020.

In 2021 I completed a master’s degree at The Department of Digital Humanities (DDH), King’s College London where I looked into the relationship between monopolies and innovation, specifically, if the presence of large technology platforms reduces the flow of venture capital funding into startups operating in similar markets. You can read my research on venture capital kill zones in full on this blog.

In 2022 helped co-found Jetty, a recruitment marketplace for senior marketing leaders.

In my spare time I’m a keen runner, part of Seedcamp’s Expert Collective and sit on the board of two early stage startups.

This blog has been up and running since 2004. I post on a wide variety of topics.

If you’d like to get in touch, please do. Hint: my name at gmail dot com.

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This is a Jekyll blog that makes use of the simple theme by David Lin. The entire blog is available to download via my GitHub.