Danny Crichton
Danny Crichton is an award-winning researcher and writer on regional innovation hubs with an intense passion for building companies and building nations. He is currently a doctoral student at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a contributing writer for TechCrunch.
Founding his first company in high school, Danny was formerly an investor at General Catalyst Partners, where he engaged companies in the mobile, labor, defense and security spaces. He led the technical infrastructure for SignalFire, a data-driven talent firm, and worked on several of the firm's investments.
In 2011-2012, Danny was a Fulbright Scholar in South Korea, where he was a visiting researcher at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Daejeon. His research investigated the impact of Korean government policy on the engineering pipeline of new graduates between high school and the workforce, as well as the individuals and groups that have formed in the Seoul regional innovation hub. He presented his research at KAIST, the Korean-American Education Commission (KAEC), Samsung's Global Strategy Group, and on the Korean radio station Arirang.
Before leaving the United States, he worked in product management at Google, where he conceived and launched Google+ Search.
While at Stanford University in California, Danny wrote an award-winning thesis on the history of Silicon Valley and Stanford's Department of Computer Science, developing a novel ecosystem-based model to analyze the unique development of the world's most recognized regional innovation hub. He presented the paper at the Triple Helix Conference, one of the largest research organizations devoted to building regional innovation throughout the world.
He has been quoted in The New York Times, Forbes, New York Magazine, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, BusinessInsider, as well as by the National Academies of Science.
Danny graduated with honors and Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University with a B.S. in Mathematical and Computational Science.
CrunchBase profile →Featured Picks from Danny Crichton
Latest from Danny Crichton
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BriefMe Launches Socially-Ranked News App In Latest Entrant In Front Page Revolution
Primacy is the most important decision facing news editors on a daily basis. What stories do they want to bring attention to? Newspapers can showcase their best content by placing it on the front page, above the fold. Television news programs can place it on the chyron at the bottom of the screen, boldly demanding the attention of viewers. And websites showcase their important stories with… Read More
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It’s Well Past Time VCs Hired HR Directors
Those following the Pao/KPCB saga in court yesterday were treated to the testimony of Trae Vassallo, a former Kleiner partner, who claimed on the witness stand that she too was uncomfortably propositioned by Ajit Nazre. Nazre was the Kleiner partner who Pao claims in her lawsuit harassed her after the two had a falling out. Vassallo said in court that when she brought this to the attention of… Read More
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Armed With $2M, Fedora Hopes To Create The Next Million Dollar Teachers
For years, the formula for teaching has been simple in the United States. Get a license from a local college, join a public school, and teach several groups of kids a day for the next several decades. Pay for the profession remains low, but is mostly consistent. To increase earnings, teachers can take additional classes toward master’s and doctoral degrees, or just wait their turn… Read More
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How 51 Shades Of Licensing Is Killing Our Economy
Who should live and who should die? Every day, thousands of patients across the United States put their lives into the hands of trained medical professionals, relying on the skill, experience, and intuition of these experts to safely regain their health. Medical doctors are strictly licensed, required to go through years of rigorous academic training and apprenticeships before they are allowed… Read More
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Harvard Innovation Challenge Winner Quorum Hopes To Replace Gaggles Of Interns In DC With Data-Driven Policy
Every summer, thousands of mostly unpaid interns flood the nation’s capital to learn the intricacies of passing legislation (read: making coffee). All of those projects like “who voted for us?” and “what should we do next?” that have been on the office back burner since they just aren’t important to anyone now have a chance to grab the limelight. Few… Read More
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Startups, A Rich Man’s Game
Despite the Silicon Valley echo chamber, starting a company remains easily among the most risky career moves for workers. The stress of the job can easily lead to burnout or long-lasting mental health issues. Failures, despite being lauded in some corners, still too often harm a founder’s future career prospects. But the greatest risk of building a new company is almost certainly financial. Read More
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MIT Alums Launch Beansprock, An AI-Based Job Platform For Finding Your Best Employer
When we think of employment, we think of jobs. We have job boards, job searches, and job listings, and yet what most of us actually care about when we change positions is the context of our new employment. Who will be our coworkers? What will the company be like? How large is it? What will be our role? Read More
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Silicon Valley Reinvents The Invisible Hand
Jobs are the lifeblood of the economy. Whether self-employed or company-employed, workers rely on steady incomes to consume goods and pay for all of the necessities of life. When jobs are plentiful, friction decreases between job applicants and employers, ensuring that income is earned earlier and more frequently. Read More
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With Mimo, MIT Alums Are Disrupting The Baby Nursery, Onesie At A Time
For all the innovation that has come out of startups, few have addressed one of the hardest tasks in the world: caring for a newborn infant. Whether it is providing milk at 3 a.m. or ensuring that the baby is exposed to the right shapes and sounds appropriate for its age, parents are faced with a near-constant barrage of challenges, often under incredible pressure and stress. Read More
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Rebuilding VC, And Saving Boston Too
There is a tension at the heart of the startup ecosystem in Boston between glorifying the city’s past as a leader in the Industrial Revolution and acknowledging the city’s current status in the tech world behind Silicon Valley and New York City. No where is that tension more visible than in the relationships between founders and venture capitalists. Founders frequently complain… Read More
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How Yello Mobile Ate 61 Startups In One Year
So many eyeballs, so little growth. Or so Yahoo’s recent performance under Marissa Mayer could be summarized. Joining Yahoo as its head in 2012, Mayer quickly made a splash with a rapid series of acquisitions, from the billion dollar purchase of Tumblr to the $30 million acquisition of Summly. The performance of that strategy has been lackluster. While Yahoo has acquired nearly 50… Read More
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The Hypocrisy of U.S. Cyber Policy
The breakneck growth in internet usage over the past two decades has forced policymakers to confront a host of challenges, from how to regulate the sharing economy to who owns the infrastructure behind the “tubes” themselves. While tempers have flared on a number of these issues, I tend to give the benefit of the doubt to policymakers. The transformation of our society has been… Read More
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2015 Is Shaping Up To Be The Key Year For Venture Capital
Eye-popping is the only word that comes close to describing the numbers we saw this year from venture finance. The valuations accelerated rapidly, with companies like Slack jumping past the billion dollar mark in less than a year of the launch of its enterprise social product. Google announced a massive $542 million round in Magic Leap in October, and just yesterday, Instacart announced that… Read More
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Fighting Distractions Should Be Top Resolution For 2015
BING the head of Sony Pictures is talking about CLICK my friend just uploaded a photo to Face BING the wreckage of the AirAsia flight PLOP Danny, are you around for dinner? We are thinking DING Try out the new version of our app CLICK the weather today will be PING Danny, we have a brilliant idea for a startup and we are launching on Kickstarter. BUZZ. Game over. The first minutes after waking… Read More
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Actually, Our Greatest Hopes Lie With Techies
For all the stories of 2014, few got the attention of the press like the tension between San Francisco residents and the rising tide of engineers and startup founders who started calling the city their home. Accused of driving up rents for apartments as well as blocking bus stops, these techies have been under constant criticism from locals who see these newcomers enjoying the city without… Read More
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From Internet To Internets
Over the past few days, China has blocked access to servers required to use Gmail through its Great Firewall. Earlier this month, Spain passed a law that requires Google to pay fees to publishers for every single snippet of a news article the company uses with Google News. Russia blocked the websites of several of Vladimir Putin’s critics, and also convinced Facebook to block the page of… Read More
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How Many Millions Should I Take From My Startup?
Dear Danny, I am a young founder currently finishing a fundraising process and have multiple term sheets at absurd valuations with no expectation of offering board seats. I am trying to find ways to distinguish between these offers, and I recently heard that some of my best friends are using VCs like ATMs, and taking millions off the table through secondary offerings. I only fly first class… Read More
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On Immigration, Engineers Simply Don’t Trust VCs
In an essay posted on his website, Paul Graham, the co-founder and former head of YCombinator, loudly called for an increase in skilled immigration. Writing with an intensity that is unusual in his writing, Graham argued that “The US has less than 5% of the world’s population. Which means if the qualities that make someone a great programmer are evenly distributed, 95% of great… Read More
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What 2014 Tech Products Made The Mom Cut?
Anthropology is the study of humans, and little fascinates me more than watching humans interact with technology. We express such a broad range of emotions when we use our gadgets and devices, from delight at a beautiful user experience to deep anger at error screens and lost data. It’s like those videos of monkeys using tools to open up nuts, except far closer to home. For the five of… Read More
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Following Charges, Uber Confronts Its Asian Dilemma
The extent governments are willing to go to crack down on Uber has reached a new high-water mark yesterday after Korean prosecutors charged Travis Kalanick, the co-founder and CEO of Uber, of violating local transportation laws. If he were convicted, the punishment could include fines, and perhaps a first for the company and its leadership, a possible jail sentence. Uber has said in a… Read More
