Channel Partners Advisory Board Member Profile: Liquid Networx's Don Douglas
Ask Don Douglas why he went into IT and telecommunications, and he’ll tell you it’s because he has fun.
January 23, 2015
By James Anderson
**Editor’s Note: This is one of a series of profiles featuring Channel Partners advisory board members. Meet Douglas and the rest of the board by attending the Spring 2015 Channel Partners Conference & Expo. Register here.**
Ask Don Douglas why he went into IT and telecommunications, and he’ll tell you it’s because he has fun.
“I don’t know that I have a ton of ambition. That may sound really odd,” said Douglas, CEO of Liquid Networx. “I’m not trying to take over the world, and I’m not trying to become a billionaire. I’m just trying to work on stuff that’s fun, things that interest me, things that I can learn.”
Douglas has spent the past 12 years at the helm of the San Antonio-based MSP, where his passion for technology and an inherited propensity for entrepreneurship have merged. But his career began, simply enough, as a 14-year-old who wanted to direct movies and design video games.
“Being able to tell a story using computer graphics and special effects – I knew you were going to be able to do that stuff with computers, and it’s fascinated me,” he said. “So more than just saying, ‘Oh, well, hey, this going to be a great career, and I can make money doing this,’ it was more like, ‘This is really cool; I want to do this.’”
Video games were a relatively new phenomenon in the early 1980s, with Nintendo in its infancy and Atari “becoming lame,” Douglas said. He laughingly recalls that his father, Donald Sr., advised him to get into business programming long-term because video games looked like a fad. The elder Douglas, then a vice president of IT operations at a regional bank, was instrumental in his son taking the IT route.