North Shore Towers Courier n April 2014 25 BY VICTOR G. MIMONI What do you call a college kid making $8 an hour tutoring, who starts a business with five dollars and some class notes and goes on to creates the largest business of its kind in the world, based on a tween-age valentine to their dog? Dani. Dani Horowitz, is not your typical North Shore Towers resident. Diminutive and looking much younger than her 31 years, she laughs easily as she matter-offactly describes her 21st Century Horatio Alger story. Born in 1982, Horowitz was just your ordinary Herricks High School Student who was winning “Women in Science” Awards when she decided to improve her 100 word-per-minute typing skills by writing her own typing tutor computer program. “I really wanted to be a Math teacher even in elementary school,” she recalled, “but I was very, very good at computer programming.” Apparently so, since by the time she graduated as a member of the National Honor Society, she had selftutored her typing speed to 180 words per minute. Horowitz settled into Hofstra University, pursuing a BS in Computer Science (CS), a minor in Business Computer Information Systems (an Information Technology program of the Business School) and a second minor in Chemistry. By her second semester, she found herself hired by the University tutoring freshmen and sophomores for $8 an hour in the computer lab. “I was the only tutor for the computer science department,” and it dawned on her that, “As junior or a senior who am I going to go to if I need help?” So what do you do back in 2001, before there were programs to create web pages, or Facebook, or any of the social media nearly everyone takes for granted? “I started a web site for computer science students so if I needed help I could post a question and maybe another computer science student somewhere in the world could help me – basically a message board where CS students could talk,” she says, casually dropping into the conversation that, “I had written the software from scratch.” Not wanting to waste any money, Horowitz shelled out $5 for a month of web hosting, using the name of her middle school web page about her dog: DaniWeb. Her first tutorial was edited out of her class notes – thanks to her blazing speed on the keyboard. Almost immediately the site was the cyber-version of passing notes in class, except that computer students from all over the world started to notice the expert programming there. “I loved the idea that I could put something up on the web and 10 minutes later someone from around the world is actually using what I had just created,” Horowitz bubbled. Among a peer group where “instant gratification” usually refers to microwave snacks, she turned it into a business plan. “I wanted to get my MBA then be a software engineer for some major corporation.” The problem was that, a year down the road, you might see (your work) on the store shelves.” “But I loved that I can conceptualize something, create it minutes later and an hour later people around the world are using it –and that got me interested in internet marketing. What can I do to get 1,000 people to use it or 10,000?” The short answer is that Horowitz became an expert in thenobscure terms like “Search Engine Optimization” and “Color Theory” to take DaniWeb from a circle of friends to a burgeoning internet information exchange with a hundred categories, a million members and millions of visitors a month. So far, she’s left the web sites of major computer magazines like ghost towns, turned down a $10 million offer for her company during the dotcom heyday, cleared out of a $10,000 a month office in Uniondale (because her employees and volunteers telecommute) and now has DaniWeb on the list of largest web sites in the world, “just above Toys ‘R’ Us.” What else can you do when you work at home, besides going to the restaurant or the VIP room, or the gym and you just feel the need to get out of the house for some social interaction? Noting that “as much as I love it here, I needed someplace to go,” Horowitz created an entirely new concept by taking office space in Bayside based on the idea of gym membership, creating a “meet-up” space for other computersavvy entrepreneurs in Queens and Nassau. In less than a month, it has a hundred members with 24/7 access, brainstorming day and night. In fact, she almost wasn’t a resident at all. In 2010 after growing up in Searingtown, at 26 years-old, she was looking to buy rather than rent, but knew that “I wouldn’t find a building full of young people I’d want to hang out with.” After a deal in Great Neck that fell through, she was a day or two away from going to contract on a co-op in Bayside when she decide to “make sure I was making the right decision” by checking out North Shore Towers. “I had heard about it, but hadn’t considered it,” she admitted. So I called Linda (Rappaport, of Charles H. Greenthal Property Sales) for a tour. It was amazing – the apartments were actually much bigger for the same price.” After viewing an 18th floor twobedroom, “I loved the apartment, the view, the amenities and the whole complex…” but, she had reservations because there were so few young people. Then again, she knows that when you’re a twenty-something, “old” begins at 40, so, “I went back with my mother and after we slept on it we both came to the conclusion that no matter where I bought – it wasn’t going to be full of people I’d want to be best friends with.” “I really love it here.”
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