Chief Executive Officer, Geostellar
By Jennifer Jett
PLAYING SOCCER on the beach with Habib; dancing in a discotheque to a Beatles cover band with Peace Corps workers on the island of Kerkkenah; riding camels through the Sahara. David Levine spent his childhood summers traveling to exotic and unusual places with his father, an epidemiologist with the public health service. His adolescent years are marked by trips to Tunisia, Sweden, Italy, France, Russia, Denmark and a host of other places many children—and adults, for that matter—never have the opportunity to experience.
This entrepreneur would get frustrated as a child when people would ask him what he wanted to be when he grew up. “It drove me crazy when people asked me to choose one thing,” he remembers. Eventually he discovered that entrepreneurship could provide the best of all worlds to the young man who didn’t want to be defined by one field or profession. “My company, Geostellar, integrates every one of my interests: the environment, the economy, policy and aesthetics. I get to be what I wanted to be when I grew up.”
Levine’s worldly knowledge and extensively diverse experiences began with his trips with his father and extended into other areas of personal interest. He spent four years sun-dancing on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, during which time he abstained from alcohol, participated in frequent sweat lodges and supported medicine men in healing ceremonies such as Yuwipi, Lowampi and Hunkapi. He dropped out of grad school to write songs and perform on four albums for the band Senator Flux, all on European labels. Touring with the band, he recalls, was a travel experience much different than that which he had experienced with his family as a child.
After the tour, he brought the band to Ann Arbor, MI, where he shot a video that made it onto MTV. “It was my first experience in real entrepreneurship,” says the boy who used to be paid with root beer floats by neighbors to cut lawns and clean window wells. “In the band, I was the non-navigator—I created the space for all of these talented people to practice their craft. It’s the same thing I do now—keep the space open for software engineers, designers and marketers to invent and produce.” In 1991, the band broke up in time for Levine to discover the Internet. “I knew I had to create works within this new medium,” he remembers, “and the only way to do that was to become an entrepreneur. I never looked back.”
He defines one of his most important personal characteristics as passion. “Nobody can deny that I immerse myself in all aspects of a project—the people, the places, the ideas, the possibilities.” His greatest success, he says, is his family—his wife Monica and his three children, Zoe, Milo and Daisy. “My kids are just so much fun, so loving, so creative and talented that I know I have given great gifts to the world through these amazing people.”
When Levine’s first child was born, he and his wife discussed where they would have wanted to grow up if they had had the choice. Levine immediately thought of Shepherdstown, a small town he had visited several times while building crates in the basement of the Smithsonian and working as a pit crew member for Army of Darkness Racing. “The moment of peace for me was walking down our street and seeing Larry, a fiddler I had worked with at the Smithsonian, sitting on the curb with an iguana on his shoulder. I knew the town was just as I remembered it.”
Of working in West Virginia, Levine says, “It has been much more difficult getting tech companies off the ground than it would have been in D.C., New York or San Francisco, but it’s a place where we can be real. Shepherdstown allows me to be creative and a full human being.”
Photography by Tracy Toler
