About Dave Maney

Essayist and historian Walter Russell Mead has written that “The more complex a society and the more rapidly it is changing, the more need it has for multi-disciplinary, synthesizing (thinkers) who are focused on communicating serious ideas to a large audience.”

That notion is what Economaney’s all about, and the role Professor Mead describes is one that Dave Maney, our Founder and Publisher, is working hard to try to fill.

If Economaney succeeds in helping our readers understand and synthesize the tectonic forces and wild changes pounding through our economy, some of the credit is due to Dave’s tours of tours of duty in the news media, politics, the telecommunications industry, and the start-up world. His extensive experience in non-profit adult education helps, too.

Dave began his media career in his home town of Binghamton, New York as a music reviewer for the Binghamton Press and Sun-Bulletin, and jumped into the world of television as a news writer and producer (and eventually, on-air host) at the NBC affiliate there.

After being drafted at 21 as a sacrificial lamb candidate for the New York State Assembly (and taking his whipping at the hands of powerful and popular Assemblyman Jim Tallon), he went to work for the state senate majority leader, and then headed off to graduate business school at Stanford, where he played editor-in-chief for the first time at the business school's newspaper.

He joined the San Francisco Chronicle's parent company as assistant to the president of the newspaper division and also was a business writer at the Chronicle’s Bloomington (Illinois) Pantagraph and the Worcester (Massachusetts) Telegram & Gazette. He returned to San Francisco to help launch a new cable television company in 1988 and became a senior operating executive there before getting his sorry ass fired in 1994.

His risk tolerance having thus been adjusted toward the "What the hell, why not" side, he chose to found Worldbridge, a broadband technology services provider to the cable industry, that same year. The company was sold to a public electronics maker, C-Cor, in the go-go months of early 2000.

He co-founded his second company, Headwaters MB, a merchant banking firm, in 2001, and helped build it into one of the largest in the Rocky Mountain West, having advised on transactions worth more than $6 billion since its founding. He left Headwaters in the capable hands of his co-founder in 2010 to launch Economaney.

Dave has also played a key role in developing educational and media strategies for the Young Presidents Organization (for three years as a its international education chairman and board member).

He was lured back to the media world in 2008, and quickly became a frequently-sought economic commentator. On a good day, he combines his nuts-and-bolts entrepreneurial knowledge, his access to private company CEOs and founders around the world, and his experience in education and communication to help explain complex and unprecedented economic events in terms normal people can understand. (On a bad day, he's like an incomprehensible drunk on the stool next to you at the bar.)

He lives in Colorado with his four daughters, one son, one wife, three dogs, and two motorcycles.