EarthLink Founder, Sky Dayton, Joins Artsy as Active Board Director

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sky Dayton, Founder of EarthLink and one of the world's most successful Internet entrepreneurs, has joined Artsy as a highly active Board Director, alongside Wendi Deng Murdoch and Artsy CEO, Carter Cleveland (who will maintain board control). Dayton will focus primarily on Artsy’s high level strategy, marketing, fundraising, and strategic partnerships.

Sky Dayton founded EarthLink in 1994 and built the company into the world’s largest independent ISP when it IPO’d in 1997. Dayton cut the deal with Steve Jobs that made EarthLink the default ISP for all Apple products and ultimately oversaw Earthlink’s growth to over 5 million customers and more than $1 billion in revenue. Including EarthLink, Dayton has founded, co-founded, and helped build several tech companies that have gone public or been sold for almost $3 billion in aggregate market value.

His father a sculptor and his mother a poet, Dayton has been involved with art since childhood. Over the past few years Dayton’s interest in collecting led him to see the Internet’s potential to fundamentally change the art market, stating: Art presents a perfect opportunity for a disruptive new online marketplace. The art economy is pretty big, in the $10's of billions, but it can get a lot bigger. Today, massive amounts of inventory are trapped in isolated locations while the majority of the world's walls remain empty of real art. Hundreds of millions of people with disposable income are waiting to become collectors and to discover a platform that can serve them, a place where they can browse, learn, share, discover and confidently purchase, where the opacity and friction of today's art collecting system is gone. The Artsy platform makes the collecting experience so much better for everyone, and ultimately, all participants will be huge winners, including collectors, gallery owners, museums and most importantly, artists. The result will be more art in the world.

On his decision to join Artsy’s team, Dayton stated, I've spent a lot of time in the emerging online art space and concluded that Artsy has the best product, the best team, the most embracive vision, and the most promise to build the future platform of the art market.

Full press release here.