Another story of 2 alumni changing careers, and working together after Penn.
Dana Kanze (W’01, Kappa Alpha Theta, Penn Fund caller) and Mason Sexton (C’01) founded Moonit.com, an online media property that offers relationship compatibility based on astrology.
After the jump, learn more about how this now engaged couple:
Both Dana and Mason had careers in finance. Dana worked at Salomon Smith Barney where she did investment banking, then equity research and corporate M&A for 5 years before working at a boutique investment bank and strategic consultancy. Mason was previously a buy side equity analyst at Tocqueville Asset Management, a $7 billion diversified asset manager that manages both international and domestic mutual funds.
So why and how did they leave this to start moonit.com, their new dating site?
Interestingly, Mason’s father is an investment manager who used astrology to perform technical chart analysis and more accurately predicted the crash of 1987 than anyone else in print; he subsequently became known as the “Moon Man” by the press.
His father not only used astrology in finance, but also in Dana and Mason’s relationship! His father ran Dana and Mason’s astrological chart early on and said they’d be great business partners, in addition to having strong long-term relationship potential. (FYI, Dana and Mason were both in the same year at Penn and had the same group of friends, but they only started dating about 4 years after they graduated.)
Based on this experience, Dana and Mason decided to start up a site which would do the same for millions of other people. And so moonit.com was born. Dana had seen many young entrepreneurs get their ideas funded and sold, so she and Mason mustered up the courage to do the same. They beta launched Moonit as semi-finalists at TechCrunch in San Francisco in September 2009, and recently launched the site with a full suite of services in June.
Check out the news segment ABC did on them recently below:
More Penn alumni “changing careers” HERE
More Penn alumni “working together” HERE
Other Penn alumni in the “dating” arena HERE
More Penn alumni with websites HERE
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I love Moonit….however, it should take birthtime into account when possible, since without it you’re only getting HALF the story. I’ve been studying Astrology since 1988, and have never felt the complete story is told without it. Getting the time, however, could prove very difficult ;p