Dalton Caldwell (born February 27, 1980) is an American technologist and digital music entrepreneur. He is the founder and chief executive officer of Mixed Media Labs. He currently works as a partner at

Y Combinator Y Combinator (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, St ...

Biography

Caldwell was born in

El Paso, Texas El Paso (; "the pass") is a city in and the county seat, seat of El Paso County, Texas, El Paso County in the western corner of the U.S. state of Texas. The 2020 population of the city from the United States Census Bureau, U.S. Census Bureau w ...

, and graduated from Stanford University in 2003 with a B.S. in

symbolic systems Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, computational linguistics ...

and a B.A. in

psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between ...

. After graduation, Caldwell worked briefly for

VA Linux Geeknet, Inc. is a Fairfax County, Virginia–based company that is a subsidiary of GameStop. The company was formerly known as VA Research, VA Linux Systems, VA Software, and SourceForge, Inc. History VA Research VA Research was founded in Nove ...

(where he had previously worked as a summer intern) before founding

imeem The online service imeem was a social media website where users interacted with each other by Streaming media, streaming, uploading and sharing music and music videos. It operated from 2003 until 2009 when it was shut down after being acquired by ...

in late 2003 with Stanford classmate (and ex- Napster engineer) Jan Jannink. imeem was eventually bought by MySpace. Caldwell founded Mixed Media Labs in 2010. Its first product was picplz, a photo broadcasting application for phones. In October 2010, Caldwell spoke at

’s Startup School event at Stanford University about the failures of imeem and of the challenges still facing the music industry. Caldwell started

App.net App.net was an ad-free online social networking service and microblogging service which enabled its users to write messages of up to 256 characters. App.net provided their own web interface to the service, Alpha, which was used by some users. How ...

, through Mixed Media Labs, as a social network similar to Twitter, but with no advertising, instead relying on user and developer subscriptions. On May 6, 2014, Caldwell announced the service has not seen sufficient subscriptions to support any full-time employees and that it would remain online but without plans for enhancements or improvements.

References

External links

* Stone, Brad (May 27, 2009)
"Music Labels Cut Friendlier Deals with Startups"
''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

''. {{DEFAULTSORT:Caldwell, Dalton Living people 1980 births Geeknet People from El Paso, Texas Stanford University alumni Y Combinator people