| Sultans of Surf |
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Page 5 of 7 
Never one to be discouraged by conventional wisdom or a challenge, Dayton could tell you his Business.com success is symbolic of his entire career. Son of New Age parents (mom’s a poet, dad’s a sculptor), Dayton, who’s from New York, hoped to go to art school to become a Disney animator. But when he wasn’t accepted, he regrouped and in 1990, with $10,000 from his grandmother, started his first business: a hip coffeehouse in Hollywood, Café Mocha.Business thrived and Dayton soon bought a second café, followed by a computer-graphics boutique serving mostly entertainment business clients. Then in 1994, at age 23, after spending 80 frustrating hours trying to get hooked up to the Internet, Dayton decided there had to be a better way. So he strung together ten modems and founded EarthLink to make it easy for everyone else. The company went on to become one of the world’s largest Internet service providers, with annual revenue of $1.4 billion. But he didn’t stop there. In 2000 he cofounded Jamdat Mobile, which he sold last year for $680 million. Then in 2001, he started Boingo Wireless, the largest Wi-Fi aggregator in the world. And in 2005 he established his latest venture, Helio. One afternoon while hanging out with Dayton on the back deck of Ocean Dancer, I ask him if he ever thinks about just retiring—surfing for the rest of his life. “That’s one thing I had to come to grips with in the last seven or eight years,” says Dayton. “I can actually do anything: I can stop working. I can go anywhere. I can go surfing for the rest of my life. But I realize that I am never going to be happy doing just anything. “The idle rich are a study in insanity. They have nothing to do, so they invent games. Your game can become your houses and your cars and your stuff. But I’m not interested in that. My stuff is there to facilitate my other goals: business, life, everything. “You have to play a game all the time. So while I’m on this boat, for instance, I’m constantly like, ‘How can we make the boat better?’ If I was living on a yacht like this, I would probably end up with a fleet of boats, chartering for other people to pay for my boat. Sure, I would be making money, but that’s just a by-product. What’s important are the games we play.” Our game of surfing continues with another perfect morning in the water on day five. Perfect until the wind starts to blow and trash the waves. With the afternoon a bust, Balfour and I decide to explore the nearby island of Lakanfushi. It’s the first time we’ve touched land in nearly a week, and it’s comforting to shuffle my bare feet along the streets of sand and tiny bits of coral and shells. |
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