Dan Whaley
CEO, Climos
Dan Whaley was an early pioneer in
e-commerce—innovating numerous technical and
commercial practices in widespread use today.
In early 1994, Dan saw the possibility of
e-commerce and developed the first basic software platform allowing any general
business to be transacted online. In the
fall of that year he created an online presence for a west-coast restaurant
delivery company, Waiters on Wheels, that conducted
one of the first retail transactions over made over the web.
Around the same time he realized that
travel reservations were ideally suited to the online world, and founded
Internet Travel Network (ITN.com)—later renamed GetThere—with his father and a
good friend. In June of 1995, the first
travel reservation ever made over the web was booked through a web server
located in his living room (it was a
Dan’s technical skills (he wrote most of
the software for the early ITN system), business instinct and strategic
thinking, along with a world class management team, helped propel GetThere
quickly to its leadership position, outmaneuvering both Microsoft and Sabre in
the highly competitive business travel segment.
In four years, GetThere was the dominant provider of Internet-based
travel reservation functionality to the airline, corporate and leisure travel
industries--booking more web-based travel reservations than any other
competitor. After an IPO in 1999, the
company was sold to The Sabre Group (NYSE: TSG) in 2000 for $750 million—nearly
1/3 of Sabre’s market cap. This still
stands as the largest cash deal for an Internet company.
Under Sabre, GetThere continues to host
the online reservation function for travel industry customers such as United
Airlines and American Express, as well as major international corporate
customers such as Procter and Gamble, Chevron, Nokia, and Cisco. The GetThere
product today commands close to 75% market share within Fortune 200 companies
where it enables ordinary business travelers to book reservations within
corporate policy at the lowest possible price.
The ITN/GetThere business development
pioneered many basic concepts now in broad use within online commerce, such as
a template system which allows the abstraction of HTML pages in a database
driven website, the concept of the service bureau or Application Service
Provider (ASP) business model and the private labeled site, which leverages a
core set of functionality across a broad set of customers.
In 1996, Dan was recognized by Business
Travel News as one of the "Top 25 Most Influential Executives" in the
travel industry. He has received numerous other awards and has spoken and
served in a variety of capacities within both the Internet and travel
industries.
A self-taught computer programmer, he
earlier wrote one of the first software systems to detect reversals of the
earth’s magnetic pole in cryogenically cooled deep-sea sediment samples for Dr.
John King at the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of
Oceanography. He has also participated
in two JGOFS (Joint Global Ocean Flux Study) cruises in the Equatorial Pacific
where he helped run a piston-coring apparatus to obtain samples along the
Tahiti-Hawaii transect.
Dan is a highly skilled technologist,
software architect and business strategist who regularly provides business
consulting to a variety of startup and ongoing companies. He earned his BA in English from the
He has traveled extensively, including
bicycling solo across the
Dan is currently engaged in a number of
projects and resides in