Dana Grant Williams

Sometimes you know you work with great people and don’t realize how much of an influence they were until years later.

When I embarked on my career after university it was the tail of the first dot com bubble. I was hired by a startup called SonicBoomerang to build a media crawler and content sentiment detector. Since developers were still very much in demand my salary was let’s say greater than my worth. But I didn’t know that at the time.

The co-founder and co-CEO was Dana Grant. Dana was incredibly energetic and positive. I didn’t fully appreciate the personal investment she had made to see SonicBoomerang succeed. 

Not having been through a startup before I had romanticized the experience. It was VCs throwing investments at you, parties and ping pong tables. Eventually I came to realize that a startup is a challenging world. You often have to grind it out and the reality is, success is often not achieved. Dana understood this challenge whereas I was naive. 

Dana brought 110% to SonicBoomerang doing what she had to in order to keep the company going. I remember her saying to me once, “we work hard and we play hard”. When you’re in your 20’s, energy is plentiful. Dana wanted to ensure I was equally committed to the goal but that I was enjoying the experience. It was Dana’s care for quality during and after the work day that often stood out.

Ultimately SonicBoomerang was my first harsh reality of how daunting a start-up can be. I was in over my head attempting to build software that may or may not have been able to realize the goal of media sentiment prediction. I felt guilty that I had not only let myself down but Dana as she had demonstrated to me the sacrifices that have to be made if you want to achieve your goal in building a successful startup. The experience was eye opening and shaped how I would view my own company and future startups.

I’m very thankful and very honoured to include Dana in My52.

LinkedIn: /danagrantwilliams

Twitter: @DGW01