Dan Castles leads Telestream company
Calvin Bratt
Tribune editor
Dan Castles
LYNDEN -- Dan Castles knows that he will be associated with the 1974 Mount Baker High School basketball team that took second in state, losing to Nook-sack Valley five times that season including for the state title.
Ironically, one of his best buddies from that era is Jim Sterk, of Nooksack Valley, now athletic director at Washington State University.
And Castles might post up a greater physical presence now at 6-6 and a fit 213 pounds.
Besides being the president and CEO of a high-tech California company, the 51-year-old stays active playing racquetball and also basketball in leagues of 20-somethings and he was active in high school assistant coaching until two years ago.
“I try to do something hard five out of seven days,” he said from Grass Valley, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas northeast of Sacramento.
Dan and his wife, Joanne, originally of Ferndale, have two daughters, Mallorie, 17, and Miranda, 14, who are both deeply involved in school and traveling league volleyball. Fortunately, their father said, home, school and his Telestream company are all within a few minutes of each other, so he can scoot between all sides of his life fairly easily.
It’s been an interesting career journey for Castles paralleling the explosive growth of the Internet.
After graduating from WSU in Pullman in 1978 with a degree in business, he landed his first job with Tektronix, the west Portland, Ore., firm that was positioned on cusp of computer technology. It reached a peak employment of nearly 25,000 in the early 1980s before spinoffs capitalized on all the potential.
Castle served as controller and then vice president of the Television Division at Tektronix, and he earned his MBA from the University of Portland along the way.
In 1994 he was named president of the Grass Valley Group, then a division of Tektronix. The high-country setting in California agreed with his Mount Baker roots, and in 1998 he co-founded Telestream.
Castles is quick to joke that describing his work could make someone doze off. Telestream, according to its own Website, specializes in products that simplify the access and exchange of high-quality video and audio over data networks. Plug-in desktop components allow encoding from live or tape sources.
He does lots of business with the broadcast industry, but the highly popular YouTube is also an obvious point of growth.
Castles said that, as a technology leader, it’s not so important when or where he does his work. “It’s more what you do than when you do it. It’s a fairly flexible schedule,” he said.
Telestream recently acquired a Stockholm, Sweden, company that helps solve compatibility issues between Mac and Windows platforms.
That means some trips to Europe in addition to chasing of the girls to their volleyball venues, he said. Recently, Dan was attending a tournament of one daughter in Anaheim while Joanne was at the other’s event in Spokane.
The family typically gets back up to Whatcom County about twice a year, although the recent purchase of a condo at Birch Bay may increase that.
Castles said that he remembers doing berry and haying jobs as a teen, and he frequently looks up John Clark, Lynden berry grower and retired teacher, who was the Mount Baker basketball coach in the 1970s.
Dan’s father, William, was superintendent of the Mount Baker School District for about 25 years. His widowed mother, Deloris, also lives at Grass Valley.
E-mail Calvin Bratt at editor@lyndentribune.com.
