Douglas Wicks Walker

Biography

Douglas Wicks Walker worked in businesses that connected a sale to the financing or advertising needed to make it happen. At CUShopper, his particular responsibility was the credit-union relationship: the institutions through which customers could finance purchases. A 2001 trade-press account described Doug as running those relationships for a company that had served 1,800 credit-union clients. Computers and televisions were among the goods in the family's earlier sales business. Adam described Doug as instrumental in CUShopper’s startup. Before Hydra, the family also operated an online design company whose name is not established in the account.

Born on January 28, 1947, Doug was the son of Edmund Hixon Walker and Marjorie Moulton Wicks. He married Sandra Kay Hequet; their children were Jason, Adam and Juliette. His working life increasingly overlapped with his sons' enterprises, first in the credit-union business and later in online advertising.

Doug co-founded Hydra in 2003 with his sons Jason and Adam and their partner Zac Brandenberg. Hydra operated in performance advertising. Instead of buying an advertisement simply for its appearance on a page, an advertiser could pay when the advertisement produced an agreed result, such as a sale. An intermediary coordinated advertisers and the publishers carrying the advertisements. That arrangement required money as well as marketing judgment: commissions could fall due before an advertiser's payment arrived.

The company grew rapidly. The Los Angeles Business Journal reported $108 million in 2008 revenue and growth of 333 percent over two years. It ranked sixth among the area's fastest-growing private companies.

In May 2009 Doug and his sons began W4, another performance-advertising business. Their partners included Abby Whitridge. The new company carried forward their experience matching advertisers with online publishers, but Doug had less than two years to work in it. He died of cancer on January 3, 2011.

His memorial at Westwood Village Memorial Park in Los Angeles, California, carries the exclamation “WOW!”—a brief, emphatic inscription preserved in the family evidence.