Matching Business and Technology
Derek Dukes
OMIS '95
Derek Dukes, for whom the Dukes Service Center in Lucas Hall is named, was the sixth employee at a little start-up in 1995, the year he graduated from Santa Clara with a bachelor’s degree in decision information sciences.
The start-up was Yahoo! Inc. and Dukes stayed on for 10 years, rising from Web surfer to senior product manager for Yahoo! Ad Systems and other products as the company grew to more than 10,000 employees and international reputation.
Since leaving Yahoo!, he’s become founder and CEO of Dipity (short for serendipity), a media aggregation platform he started with long-time friends from Yahoo! He says his role is “the product and business guy.”
“I don’t have the right makeup to be an amazing programmer,” he said. “The more interesting thing to me is how do you take technical ideas and manifest them as consumer products?”
The core of the business is creating an interactive experience around topics using material from the Web and other sources. The information is not only aggregated in one place but also ranked to create an easy-to-use summary.
“We look at relevancy, rank and source, then organize the material,” explained Dukes, who started at Santa Clara in computer engineering. He decided during the orientation that the field wasn’t right for him, so he turned to the decision information systems program, the precursor to the Operations and Management Information Systems degree.
“It was a great blend of business and computers,” recalled Dukes. “The best thing was Santa Clara exposed me to how to turn a great idea into a great business. Everything I learned helped me create interesting stuff at Yahoo! Santa Clara prepared me for an entrepreneurial setting early on.”
Dukes has been more active in taking advantage of opportunities offered by the Center for Entrepreneurship and alumni events at Santa Clara since leaving Yahoo!
“I’ve enjoyed hearing from other entrepreneurs who have been around for a while,” he said. “Being an entrepreneur can be lonely, so it’s great to get together with other people who have been there.”
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