Dan is an active entrepreneur with several patents and technology licenses. In May 1996, he co-founded Netbot Incorporated, creator of Jango Shopping Search and later acquired by Excite. In October 1998, Dan co-founded AdRelevance, a revolutionary monitoring service for internet advertising which was acquired by Media Metrix and subsequently by Nielsen NetRatings. In June 1999, Dan co-founded data integration company Nimble Technology which was acquired by the Actuate Corporation. In January 2001, Dan joined the Madrona Venture Group as a Venture Partner and member of the Technical Advisory Board.
For the first six months of 2011, Dan was on leave at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. In Autumn 2010, Dan taught a CSE major's capstone design class on Advanced Internet and Web Services. Previously, Dan taught many other courses, including advanced graduate classes on Extracting, managing & personalizing Web information and Intelligent User Interfaces, a graduate class on Artificial Intelligence and an undergraduate course on the same subject. Dan spent part of his 2006/2007 sabbatical in the VIBE group at Microsoft Research.