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Dan Graham

Dan Graham

Austin entrepreneur and investor: co-founder of BuildASign.com (sold to Cimpress/VistaPrint in 2018 for $280M), co-founder of Notley, and Co-Founder/General Partner of Springdale Ventures.

Sep 13, 2026

TomHOST
1:20
People are obviously more likely to be familiar with Calendly than Zapier, but you just want to talk me through what each tool is to someone who's not heard of either of them and how it might be used in a financial planning perspective.
1:29
Yeah, of course.
1:30
So...
1:34
They're both basically automation tools.
1:37
So both of them have a kind of background of removing things that humans don't like doing.
1:47
So the first one is Calendly.
1:50
And I think this is, like you said, it's the one that most people will have heard of, possibly because some people have been slagging it off, but also because there's people like us who talk about it nonstop and talk about it all the time.

26 MINS LATER

TomHOST
27:46
So what would you say, is there anything that they can't do or anything that there's limitations in terms of what they could do or anything where there might be an alternative that could be better for either of these, Zapier or Kindly? So...
4:08
I'd love to kick us off with starting out with a brief background and the path that led you through your career journey and ultimately to investing into Springdale.
4:16
Yeah, my journey was a little strange.
4:18
I was born in Austin, Texas.
4:20
I went to the University of Texas and got a degree in computer science and philosophy, which seemed really random at the time, but now seeing what AI seems really prescient for a degree combo.
4:31
I then went to law school thinking I would do intellectual property or patent law and was building websites in my spare time to earn some extra money and had partnered up with a couple of friends of mine that I had grown up with who had moved back to town after undergrad.
4:44
And we were working with a bunch of different kinds of businesses and throwing out these ideas for intricate web solutions.
4:51
And one of the companies that we pitched that rejected our website proposal ended up turning into the business that I started with them back in 2006.

17 MINS LATER

22:29
I think that would be super helpful.

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