Born in Bozeman and raised around the agriculture industry of Montana, Danny Choriki decided in his 20’s to see if there was life without dirt under his finger nails. With a degree in the social sciences, Danny went to New York City to study environmental psychology with an eye towards understanding how people cope with and adapt to rapid social and technical change. Along the way, he became an “accidental techie” as his day job during graduate school was assisting the director of The City University of New York Graduate School’s computer center to move from card punch machines, Wilbur and VAX terminals (9600 baud – woo hoo!) to pc’s on a lan, structured databases, and eventually the internet. His first full time job in NYC was at a policy research center looking at the impact of information technology on the New York City Public Schools. That was followed by a series of consulting and strategic planning positions at Fortune 50 corporations in legal, finance and telecommunications industries.
After the internet bubble burst, Danny returned to his startup roots in the online advertising technology ecosystem helping to build a vertical ad network and then the US presence of an ad serving company from Europe that was purchased by aol. After leaving aol., he founded startups in digital privacy and online games.
Along the way, Danny has been involved with the Libertarian Party, the Left Green faction of the Green Party, a reluctant republican, then a reluctant democrat, all the while protesting nuclear weapons and US military involvement in foreign adventures, International Workers of the World, and the Ethical Culture Society. He is a “card carrying member” of the ACLU and became a humanist in high school.
Danny returned to Montana in 2012 to spend some quality time with his parents and extended family in the Billings area and to help reboot his father’s startup, which after 40 years had grown a little stale. He is currently working on building on the companies 18 years of experience with GPS farming consulting using internet technologies and cameras in flying drones. He is doing some strategic business consulting, mainly helping startup plan and get through the first years.
His parents were raised on a sugar cane plantation on Kauai and came to Montana in 1955 to go to college in Bozeman. His father, Raymond Choriki, went to work at The Central Montana Experiment Station beginning a long career bringing the latest science and technology to farmers across Montana. Danny is the oldest of seven with three brothers and sisters. The extended family has been in Billings since 1984 when Ray and Doris moved the family business from Great Falls. Most of the extended family is active in the Catholic Church.
He is looking to help build the entrepreneurial and information technology communities in Montana (especially Billings). Through out his career, he has worked with not-for-profits on the technology side. He is working on a book about how to integrate strategy into daily life. He is still interested in digital privacy, ask him about his game idea (specially if you are into STEM, the economic development of low earth orbit or graphics), and hasn’t lost site of his original focus, how people adapt to rapid change.