Dave first worked with Ian White during the integration of Sailthru into Access Network’s College Publisher software in late 2010. As he grew to use and learn the product, he fell in love with its potential and the talent powering it. In July 2011, he stepped aside from Access to join Marigold Engage by Sailthru’s staff. Dave holds an M.A. in Telecommunications and B.S. in Journalism from Ball State University, where he was an unprecedented two-term Daily News (campus paper) editor-in-chief and three-term Indiana Collegiate Press Association president. He’s an (excessively) active member of Heritage of Pride, the organization behind NYC’s annual LGBT Pride Week and events, in addition to the The National 9/11 Memorial and The Trevor Project.
A little known fact about me is…I hosted a public access television show as a teen and was on-air talent for a commercial alt-rock radio station in college.
The best part of my job is… working with an amazingly passionate group of friends to build a tool that changes the way the world communicates.
Not many people know that I’m really good at… Singing? (Told)
The worst job experience I’ve ever had is…Not working. I’ve had some sort of job or volunteer role since I was 14. I can’t stand being idle.
In 5 years I want to be…wiser.
So tell us more about this television show you hosted.
“The show was called ‘ What’s Up Fort Wayne?” because I lived in Fort Wayne, and we apparently wanted to know what was up (it was the phrase back in the early ‘90s). It was some point in early middle school that I got the idea to do a television show with a good friend of mine – it stemmed from us wanting to get exclusive access to haunted houses in our home town. We did a live call-in show once a month at 4PM and brought in people from the community to interview. It definitely earned me some notoriety in the community and the school.
Did you have any fan girls?
No, no fan girls. No fan boys either… keep in mind this is before social media, but we did have a website – it’s actually programming that site on members.aol or Geocities that I first learned how to program html.
Sounds like you got a good start for a worthy cause.You do quite a bit of volunteer work, do you want to speak about that at all?
I’m super fortunate to be able to work at a place like this that allows me to take time to give back to the community. I do it through both The National 9/11 Memorial and Heritage of Pride for NYC pride. Every year I also go back to my University for a week in July and teach high school journalism workshops. I cover digital media awareness, and get the kids to think about how they use social media and how it affects the way they consume media as a whole.
Exciting! Pride is happening this weekend, can you give us any spoiler alerts? What do we have to look forward to?
Cyndi Lauper is one of our Grand Marshalls. She’ll be performing at our dances on Saturday and Sunday nights and marching on Sunday. We actually have more groups registered this year than last, and the men’s dance is going until 2 AM this year. Oh – and the fireworks will be back on Sunday.