24 Facts About Sky Dayton

Sky Dylan Dayton was born on August 8,1971 and is an American entrepreneur and investor.

Sky Dayton is a founder of Internet service provider EarthLink, co-founder of eCompanies, and the founder of Boingo.

Sky Dayton lived for a time with his maternal grandfather, David DeWitt, an IBM Fellow, who played a large part in introducing Dayton to technology.

At 16, Dayton graduated from The Delphian School, a private boarding school in Oregon, which uses study methods developed by L Ron Hubbard.

Sky Dayton wanted to be an animator but was rejected when he applied to CalArts, saying he was too young at the time.

Sky Dayton started his first business in 1990 at age 19.

In 1993, after initially having great difficulties getting his Macintosh computer to access the Internet, Sky Dayton said that he realized that the Internet was likely to become the next mass communications medium.

In 1994, Sky Dayton founded EarthLink, an Internet service provider that would offer Internet access to the public.

Sky Dayton transitioned his title from founding CEO to executive chairman, handing over day-to-day operations of the company to Charles "Garry" Betty.

In June 1999, Sky Dayton's title changed again, this time to non-executive chairman of EarthLink.

Sky Dayton formed eCompanies, an incubator and venture capital fund for developing Internet companies, with former Disney Internet chief Jake Winebaum.

In 2001, Sky Dayton started Boingo Wireless to address what he saw as a fragmentation problem inherent in Wi-Fi networks.

In 2005, Sky Dayton became CEO of Helio, a mobile phone joint venture of EarthLink and SK Telecom, formed with $220 million in funding from each company.

At that time, Sky Dayton resigned as chairman of EarthLink but remained a director.

Sky Dayton is a board member of digital education company Age of Learning, which raised $150 million in 2016 at a $1 billion valuation, and $300 million in July 2021, giving the company a $3 billion valuation.

Sky Dayton is an investor in and board member of Diffbot, a semantic web and structured data startup, and Artsy, an online art marketplace, which raised a reported $50 million in July, 2017.

Sky Dayton is an investor in Joby Aviation, a NASA LeapTech participant building an electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft, which raised $100 million from Intel, JetBlue and Toyota in February, 2018 and went public in August, 2021, at a value of $6.6 billion.

Sky Dayton was an early investor in video doorbell company Ring, which was acquired by Amazon in February, 2017 for $1 billion.

Sky Dayton is a co-founder of City Storage Systems and CloudKitchens, which in March, 2018 secured a $150 million investment from Uber founder Travis Kalanick, who joined the company as its CEO, with plans as of February, 2019, to expand into China.

In January, 2019, Sky Dayton led the Series A investment in micro satellite startup Swarm Technologies, along with PayPal co-founder David Sacks.

Sky Dayton was chosen as Entrepreneur of the Year in 1999 by the Lloyd Greif Center at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business.

In 1999, Sky Dayton was named to the MIT Technology Review TR100, a list of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35, and in 2010 was a recipient of the Dream Keeper award from the I Have a Dream Foundation.

In 2007, Dayton served on the advisory board of the Center for Public Leadership at the John F Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Sky Dayton is a surfer, amateur poker player, and airplane pilot.