Dan Scherlis <dan.scherlis.com>, veteran consumer-software CEO, is Principal of Scherlis.com, supporting the technology & communications needs of Registered Investment Advisors. This new consulting practice started when Dan’s fiancée, Kate Elliott Smith, RIA, brought him to local NAPFA meetings in his capacity as her CIO, InfoSecurity team, and tech hotline.
In his work with Financial Planners, Dan brings a media-producer’s sensitivity to user-experience and usability, working to enhance productivity and client-communications while improving security, especially IT security. His work is informed by a marketing executive’s focus on effective communications, a finance executive’s comfort with analytics, and a nerd’s capacity for technical problem-solving.
Dan is also active in evidence-based games (and other interactive technologies) for health. He is Executive Producer of “BreatheFree“, a smoking-cessation game being developed by Playmatics for Entertainment Science, supported by an NIH SBIR award. Dan also leads a team creating an interactive balance-trainer for fall prevention. He is a regular member of NIH SBIR peer review panels, where he tends to focus on commercialization, and is amused to be regularly and undeservedly addressed as “Doctor”.
Dan advises on marketing, creative strategy, and partnerships, and has served as consulting Producer. Clients have included mobile publishing, predictive analytics, and health-game development ventures. Previously, Dan was founding Content Director of a mobile-games venture within telecom giant Comverse. As CEO of Turbine, Dan was Producer of Microsoft’s Asheron’s Call, an award-winning MMO game. (“MMO” = Massively Multiplayer Online, a community-based virtual world). At Papyrus Games, Dan led game development and publishing, and was Producer of IndyCar Racing.
Dan guest-lectures at colleges & universities, and has presented at conferences including Games For Health, GDC, MIT Enterprise Forum, E3 Expo, CTIA, and Osney’s Marketing & Monetising Mobile Games. Dan holds AB (Linguistics, Combined With Applied Mathematics), AM (Linguistics), and MBA degrees from Harvard.
As an undergraduate, he was a Teaching Fellow in Introductory Computer Science (NS100, now CS50). Dan was a post-graduate Associates Fellow at Harvard Business School, where he co-authored an Entrepreneurial Finance teaching note, A Method For Valuing High-Risk, Long-Term Investments: The “Venture Capital Method, that is still part of the MBA curriculum at Harvard.
(You can see a list of my conference presentations and other talks.)
(For more details about me, see my LinkedIn profile.)
Dan Scherlis 
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