Meet Dan Konigsberg of CampMinder in Boulder

Today we’d like to introduce you to Dan Konigsberg.

Dan, before we jump into specific questions about your work why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
I founded CampMinder in 2001, and we’ve bootstrapped the company since then. We’ve learned from the best-of-the-best summer camps in the world to understand what makes them so successful. We innovate internet-enabled technology services to enhance those best practices and make the solutions available to our clients. With a steady and consistent approach, we’ve grown organically to almost 1,000 camps and over 65 employees. Our conscious approach to leadership has also earned CampMinder recognition as one of America’s Best Workplaces by multiple national publications.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
That’s a funny question. Bootstrapping a company to this level has been far from easy. In the beginning, I was selling software as a service before that was a defined term to an industry where people worked from remote locations without high speed internet. Just convincing people to put their data “on the internet” was a hard thing to do at the beginning. We were one of the first companies to offer online payment processing, so that was a hard sell as well.

From there, we’ve had all kinds of difficult challenges from the time our photo sharing platform crashed on opening day for camps in 2010 to the time a fluke incident caused some data loss from which we had to recover. All of the struggles have banded our team together, which has made us a stronger, more resilient company.

We’d love to hear more about your work.
We identify best practices in summer camp management and innovate systems to streamline those practices in a web and mobile software-as-a-service platform. We are well-known in our industry for being the “gold standard” and for being a great company with which to work. We pride ourselves in our amazing customer service and the way we take care of our clients in a values-centric manner. In fact, I would say our biggest differentiator is our values led culture that has led us to be a nationally-recognized best workplace. We attract the best talent — far better than companies our size typically have the opportunity to employ — because of our award winning culture and the meaningful work we do. We love that we get to support an industry that helps children grow into better, more mature, and more grounded adults.

What were you like growing up?
I was always a pretty happy kid. My parents are really good people, and they instilled strong values in me throughout my childhood. I’ve always treated people with love and kindness. I never really belonged to a “clique”. I had friends in every social group and got along pretty well with everyone. I was pretty mild-mannered, so I never really made enemies either. I went to sleepaway camp growing up, so that experience helped me to further my understanding of how to be self-reliant, tolerate many different personalities, and get along well with different types of people.

In the early 90s, I became fascinated by the emerging internet technologies with AOL, Prodigy, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), and innovation we called the “world-wide-web”. The web inspired me to combine my interest in technology with my passion for music, and I created a website called “The Dave Matthews Band Tour Archive”, which ultimately won two VH1 My Music Awards. I was definitely a little nerdy, but kind of a “closeted” nerd. Most days of the week, you’d find me staying after school late to play basketball with a bunch of friends. By the time I was a senior, I learned how to play guitar, and throughout college and beyond I wrote over a hundred songs and performed in bars and music venues in Atlanta, Miami, and New York City culminating in recording an album called “Karma’s Undertow” in 2011. Then I put the guitar away, got married, had twins, and have been focusing most of my energy on learning about myself, spirituality, and leadership.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.campminder.com
• Phone: 303-444-2267
• Email: info@campminder.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/campminder/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CampMinder/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/campminder

Image Credit:
Julian Mackler, Melany Hallgren, Tobin Voggesser

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