After starting his career in finance, Dan McKinley freaked out and moved to Brooklyn. He stumbled into a fledgling Etsy.com in 2007, and spent his first years there trying to stop overwhelming traffic from reducing the site to its constituent elements. In the long summer that followed he worked on activity feeds, search, recommendations, experimentation, and analytics.

Dan worked at Stripe for a while, before moving on to co-found Skyliner.io along with Coda Hale and Marc Hedlund.