October 21, 2009 – Our Town – OWU

Internet entrepreneur Dan Daugherty ’01 returned to campus recently to speak with Economics Department students about achieving success.

Photo by Linda O’Horo

Former Google Manager Advises OWU Students on Achieving Success
Internet entrepreneur Dan Daugherty ’01 says passion and risk-taking are key factors

While a student at Ohio Wesleyan University, Dan Daugherty was an International Business major and gained a global perspective through studying abroad in Spain and Venezuela. He currently is building on this OWU experience and later work for Google to expand his rapidly growing Internet real estate rental company, which has locations throughout the world.

Daugherty returned to campus for the first time on October 12 and 13 to speak to students in the Economics Department Strategic Management senior seminar and Entrepreneurship class. He met individually with some students to provide advice, and he spoke in an open session titled “Random Thoughts on Achieving Success—in the Classroom and in Life.”

He also told OWU students that there are some things he wishes he had done while a student at OWU:

• Take as many accounting courses as possible. You need to understand accounting if you are an entrepreneur.
• Try to get a better understanding of what you want in life.
• Network as much as possible during college, and keep in touch with OWU classmates after graduation.

Daugherty runs a variety of real estate Internet start-ups, including Rent Marketer, an advertising network for rental properties; rentBits, a search engine for rental homes and apartments; and Apartment Marketer, an advertising network for multi-family space. He started developing this business in 2005, after a three-year management stint at Google.

Clients of Apartment Marketer, such as community managers and apartment management companies, can submit a classified ad once, and it is distributed electronically to more than 100 apartment rental Web sites.

He graduated from Ohio Wesleyan in 2001 and joined Google in 2002. After six months at the California headquarters, he relocated to set up Google’s Denver office. In four years he helped to increase the Mountain States Region annual sales from $1 million to more than $100 million.

He left the security of the Google work to follow his passion and start a company that matched his love of the real estate business. He says revenues for his companies have doubled each year, and tripled last year.  His business is based in Colorado, but he plans to open offices in other English-speaking countries and then in China or Latin America.

His advice for OWU students to achieve success:

• Set goals and quantify everything of significance
• Find great partners and mentors
• Feel uncomfortable every day, “push past your comfort zone”
• Get past the Dip. Push on to higher goals
• Identify and follow your passion
• Solve problems
• Do one thing really, really well
• Just do it—and visualize your dreams
• Fail often and learn from each failure. You need to take risks to achieve success
• Laugh and smile. You can be professional without wearing a suit

Daugherty says he thinks his big-picture perspective has helped him achieve success. “I have a ‘vision map,’ where I keep photos related to my goals and dream,” he says. He says he looks at it every day and pretends that these vision map goals are reality. “My dream is to affect the lives of millions—even billions—of people,” he adds.

– Linda O’Horo