Dan Dascalescu

Dan Dascalescu is a Romanian-American entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley, who co-founded the ship-based seed accelerator project Blueseed in an attempt to allow entrepreneurs to start companies near Silicon Valley without US visa restrictions. He was previously a software engineer at Yahoo! and is an ambassador for The Seasteading Institute, a think tank researching ocean communities.

Dascalescu was born in Romania and immigrated into Silicon Valley in fall 2004, after facing visa issues. He applied for a green card in 2007 and received it in April 2013. Dascalescu cited his visa difficulties as an inspiration for Blueseed, a startup accelerator that would avoid immigration restrictions by being located on a ship in international waters.

Before Blueseed, Dascalescu worked at Yahoo! as a software globalization developer and open-source contributor, and became an ambassador for the Seasteading Institute and founded the Quantified Self Forum, an online community for users passionate about self-tracking.

While in Romania, he translated books on TCP/IP networking and on building web applications. Dascalescu has a degree in Computer Science, with published papers on knowledge modeling and robotics.

Blueseed is a startup community project that Dascalescu co-founded with Seasteading Institute colleagues Max Marty and Dario Mutabdzija, and served as CIO for. The project is preparing to launch a ship near Silicon Valley to serve as a startup community and entrepreneurial incubator without United States work visa requirements. The platform is set to offer living and office space, high-speed Internet connectivity, and regular ferry service to the mainland. The existence of the project is due to the lack of U.S. visas for entrepreneurs. Instead, customers will use the much easier to obtain B-1/B-2 visas to travel to the mainland, while work will be done exclusively on the ship.

On July 31, 2013, Dascalescu became COO of Blueseed, after CEO Max Marty announced he was stepping back from day-to-day operations.

Dascalescu has spoken at Stanford University and has been interviewed on BBC, Romanian TV station Nașul TV, TV Tokyo and France 2. After speaking at the Bitcoin 2013 conference, he was interviewed on Free Talk Live.

Dascalescu's interests include transhumanism, life extension, physical fitness and self-quantification. He completed the P90X program and presented his findings at the 2011 Quantified Self conference, contrasting it with the Occam Protocol described by Tim Ferriss in Four Hour Body. He is an open-source contributor and a supporter of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin.

Wall Street Romania named Dascalescu "#1 Romanian entrepreneur to watch in 2013".