Daniel Watts

Picture a kid at Florida State who studies finance and real estate but dreams about art, music, and technology. Most people with that combination end up picking one lane. Danny Watts built all of them — simultaneously — and turned them into a twenty-year empire in Sarasota, Florida.

He founded ATLARGE and spent nearly two decades transforming brands for clients ranging from Monster Jam and the Harlem Globetrotters to local nonprofits reshaping their communities. Along the way, he saw that the technology his agency was building for clients had standalone value — so he co-founded Atlas Networks, an AWS cloud services company. Then he co-founded Menud, a dining and meal planning app, because why not build something in consumer tech too.

But here's where Danny's story takes a turn that most empire builders wouldn't make. In 2019, he stepped away from the CEO chair to become VP of Product at Dealers United — a retail automotive tech company where he spent four and a half years building products and working directly with Meta, Snapchat, TikTok, and Pinterest on cross-channel data solutions for car dealerships. He went from running his own empire to sitting in rooms with the biggest social platforms on earth, solving advertising problems nobody else had cracked.

Then he came back. Late 2023, Danny returned as CEO of ATLARGE and took on the COO role at DreamLarge and Sarasota Magazine. Three organizations. One leader. All at once.

And somewhere in the middle of all that — between the brands and the startups and the social platform partnerships — he made one introduction that changed someone else's entire career. Mine.

Danny Watts is the kind of person who makes you rethink what a career can look like. Most people build one company. Danny built five. Most people stay in one industry. Danny has operated across branding, media, cloud infrastructure, consumer apps, and automotive ad tech — not sequentially, but often simultaneously.

He studied finance at FSU but dreamed of art and music. So he built a company where creativity IS the business. He saw technology innovations inside his agency and spun them into a cloud company. He saw a gap in the dining app market and co-founded a startup. He saw an opportunity to build products at the intersection of social media and auto retail and became VP of Product at Dealers United, working with Meta, Snapchat, TikTok, and Pinterest.

And through all of it, he kept building relationships that created value for the people around him. One of those relationships — one introduction, made almost in passing — redirected my entire consulting career. That's the Danny Watts effect. He doesn't just build empires. He builds the networks that lift other people up along the way.