Dan joined Madrona as a Venture Partner in 2001. He is the general manager and chief scientist of Semantic Scholar at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (A12). Dan is also Professor Emeritus at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, where he leads a research team investigating human-centered artificial intelligence.

Journey to Madrona

Dan was the WRF/TJ Cable Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington for nearly 34 years. During that time, he co-founded three companies, all of which Madrona invested in. They include Netbot Inc. (acquired by Excite), AdRelevance (acquired by Nielson Netratings), and Nimble Technology (acquired by Actuate). In addition, he serves as a member of Madrona’s Technology Advisory Board.

Lessons learned

Mastery of unique and differentiated technology is good, but a crystalized understanding of unsatisfied customer pain is much better.

When he’s not in the office…

Dan enjoys mountaineering, technical canyoneering, and sailing. Besides scaling mountains in Europe, Ethiopia, Nepal, and Peru, Dan is among the few to climb the fabled “Bulger List” of Washington’s highest 100 peaks.

Noteworthy

Dan earned bachelor’s degrees in computer science and biochemistry at Yale University in 1982 and a Ph.D. from the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1988. He was elected an AAAS Fellow in 2020, an AMC Fellow in 2006, and an AAAI Fellow in 1999. He won an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator’s award in 1990 and a Presidential Young Investigator’s award in 1989. He is a co-founder of the Journal of AI Research and on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Dan was area editor for the Journal of the ACM, guest editor for Computational Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence, and Program Chair for AAAI.