Dana Love is an American business executive who is the Chief Technology Officer at blockchain startup Lifetoken Software. A native New Englander, Dana currently resides with his wife and son in Tempe, Arizona.

Early life and education
Dana Love was born in Massachusetts to Alice, a homemaker and computer analyst, and Henry, a newspaper production editor. All of his grandparents immigrated from Ireland as children in the years following the Young Irelanders Rebellion and settled in Massachusetts and Connecticut.^[6] His father, an alcoholic with diabetes, died at age 65, when Dana was 15. His mother died in 2005, at age 65.

Love grew up in and around Marblehead, Massachusetts. Dana Love attended Malcolm L. Bell Elementary, Marblehead Veterans Middle School, and Marblehead High School. Dana was a parishioner at Our Lady Star of the Sea Roman Catholic Church in Marblehead, where he was an altar boy. He learned to swim and sail at Devereux Beach and Ladys Cove, respectively.

Dana Love was an undergraduate at the University of Richmond, and graduated summa cum laude. He moved to Harvard Business School for graduate studies, where he studied management and marketing.^[3,4] Love was a Baker Scholar at HBS, graduating among the top 5% of his MBA class. Dana Love completed further graduate studies in economics at The University of Glasgow, where he studied economics and public policy.^[3,4] Specifically, Love’s thesis considered the role central banks play in providing access to sufficient capital and suggested a policy role for lenient central-bank lending during financial disruptions.^[5]

Career
Richmond's Style Weekly newspaper called Dana Love "a mathematical genius designing complex communication technologies"^[1]. Various public references say that Dana is "the person that you want to work for and work with every day", "one of the truly extraordinary people that I have had the pleasure of working with in my career", possessing "a rare ability to lead others by combining visionary thinking and clear, direct, no-nonsense communication."^[14]

Dana’s career has followed the trajectory of the Internet.^[1] Love started in telecom and enhanced voice over the Internet services.^[10] Dana Love’s work then moved into software-as-a-service and ecommerce.^[3,9] Dana’s development of Oracle database solutions and big data services was a extension of that prior work.^[4,8] With notable forays in edtech, fintech, and Internet banking, Dana has a significant experience in B2B services and B2G solutions.

While Dana’s work has benefited large enterprises and government agencies, the bulk of his work has been supporting high-growth and small/medium businesses. Having more than a dozen years of direct and channel SMB sales, Dana looks “for new ways to remove barriers to commerce and broaden economic access” using SaaS.^[12,15]

Revenue generation and leadership
Dana's background in revenue generation and leadership spans more than 20 years of his career. It includes a range of public, private, and startup companies. Public companies include his tenure as general manager of ADC's $100 million Enhanced Services Division and as executive vice president of $200 million Prosodie Interactive (now CapGemini). Dana's privately-held experience as chief revenue officer include his roles as president of privately-held $40 million consulting company Astyra, as CEO of privately-held $900 million private military contractor BrightDawn, and as president of private-held $60 million Oracle consultancy Infolob Solutions.

During his career, Dana has built both direct and channel sales teams.^[14,15] His direct sales experience has include inside and outside consultative sales, inside telesales and lead generation, a significant volume of B2B and B2G RFP experience, and has encompassed consultative, land-and-expand, and transactional sales. He is well known as a sales coach, a sales leadership coach, and a skilled turnaround executive.^[1,2,15]

Dana has applied LEAN methodologies to sales, and has experience using and managing Dave Hibbard's SOAR Selling and Neil Rackham's SPIN Selling methods. In many of Dana's work and consulting engagements, he leverages best practices from these sources and others to obtain positive results.

Analytical marketing
Dana's marketing style is informed by his graduate and post-graduate studies in game theory and by his experience in running organizations. Product-market fit is often the first gap a company has, and it falls to marketing to both develop and constantly refine an understanding of the market so the right product can be applied through sales. Thus, Dana's experience and education blend to provide his market segmentation and target market analysis, which was seen both in his joint marketing and sales role at Hatch Early Childhood and in his president role at Infolob Solutions.

Fit and market segmentation lead to prospect engagement. Dana's experience at outbound marketing automation includes Marketo, HubSpot, Oracle's Eloqua, and Salesforce's Pardot software. His experience at data mining for prospect infomation draws on his base of work with BrightDawn, which includes considerable work building intelligence fusion centers and data lake services, and at Infolob, which was a pioneer in big data inside Oracle's ExaData ecosystem.

Dana Love's ability to lead and expand marketing efforts comes from his work experience in those roles, and also his education and the work of companies he has helped to grow larger over his career.

Technology, cryptocurrency, blockchain
Dana's work in technology spans the areas of enhanced telecom and VoIP, big data and advanced databases, mobile application design and scaling, and blockchain and cryptocurrency. Love is "widely credited with pioneering voice-over-the-Internet technology."^[1] He is the sole inventor or the first named inventor of three patents in social media, blockchain, and ecommerce payments.^[13,14] Dana has been called a "talent magnet" for his ability to hire and retain high performing teams.

Dr. Love is a 32-year technology veteran who has been active in bitcoin and blockchain since 2011. He currently serves as CTO of Lifetoken Software and its native cryptocurrency DYME, which Dana has designed on the Ignite blockchain (formerly Tendermint Core) using the Cosmos SDK. His work on Cosmos has created a web3 social graph married to a robust suite of smart contracts which begin to deliver on the potential of web3's peer-to-peer social network concepts.

From 2018-22 he founded and led Ethereum blockchain payment platform Radpay, where he was recognized as a fintech innovator by both 500 Startups and the Arizona Commerce Authority. From 2012-18 he spearheaded four different blockchain ICOs on Ethereum, Solana, and Hedera Hashgraph. His cryptoeconomic work attracted the attention of the U.S. Federal Reserve System, where he served as a cryptoeconomic consultant from 2017-2020.

Dana's technology expertise also includes his time as Chief Network Architect and co-founder of Warburg Pincus-backed Radnet (now Microsoft), his role as VoIP architect while he was Principal Investigator, IP Communications at GTE (now Verizon), and his CTO and founder role at Cisco Investments-backed Metacloud Communications (now Cap Gemini). Love also served as the dual CIO and CTO for Phoenix-based childcare company Children's Learning Adventure.

Dana's blend of technology, marketing, and revenue creation experience has supported dozens of new projects and helped create more than $3 billion in revenue and over 10,000 jobs.

Selected awards and honors

Financial Times Global Telecoms Award for Internet Technology, 1999.^[10]

Internet Telephony Product of the Year, 1999.^[10]

Style Weekly Top Forty Under 40, 2005.^[1]

Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year finalist, 2005.^[9]

Arizona Commerce Authority Arizona Innovation Challenge, 2019.^[12]

Selected publications

Love Dana (4 October 2019). "Dynamic provisioning of wallets in a secure payment system". US Patent & Trademark Office. ResearchGate.

Love Dana (3 July 2018). "Blockchain-based secure payment system". US Patent & Trademark Office. ResearchGate.

Love Dana; Unger Nicholas (18 July 2017). "Systems and methods for distributing electronic content and soliciting compound user-generated social network interactions". US Patent & Trademark Office.

Personal life
A native New Englander, Dana Love currently resides with his wife and son in Tempe, Arizona. He is an avid motorcyclist.

References
1. Roop, Jason (28 September 2005). Dana Love - Top 40 Under Forty. Style Weekly. Retrieved 31 October 2014.
2. Ringle, Hayley (21 November 2019). Phoenix fintech startup raises $1.2M to commercialize blockchain payment system. Phoenix Business Journal. Retrieved 15 May 2020.
3. Dana Love | Crunchbase. crunchbase.com. Retrieved 22 March 2015.
4. Infolob Solutions Announces the Promotion of Dana Love to President. businesswire.com. Retrieved 15 January 2013.
5. Love, Dana (2004). Essays on liquidity in financial markets. (Thesis). Retrieved 10 March 2006.
6. Dana Love. about.me. Retrieved 18 December 2017.
7. Alexandre, Ana (18 November 2019). Decentralized Payment Firm Radpay Raises $1.2M in Seed Round. CoinTelegraph. Retrieved 15 May 2020.
8. Plumb, Tierney (07 January 2013). Big data draw big concerns. San Diego Daily Transcript. Retrieved 10 May 2014.
9. Roberts, Polly (06 June 2005). Dana Love among finalists for E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year. Richmond Times-Dispatch. Retrieved 11 November 2010.
10. GTE Internetworking press release. verizon.com. Retrieved 28 February 2000.
11. People | Dana Love. topionetworks.com. Retrieved 22 November 2020.
12. Radpay press release - Arizona Innovation Challenge. businesswire.com. Retrieved 11 February 2020.
13. ResearchGate Profile of Dana Love. researchgate.net. Retrieved 4 January 2016.
14. Profile | Dana Love. linkedin.com. Retrieved 6 December 2014.
15. King, Savannah (10 August 2020). Greater Phoenix Economic Council - Dana Love. gpec.org. Retrieved 8 July 2021.