Danny Cunagin has a cheerful phrase for an occupation that involves starting things before anyone can be certain they will work. “My mantra is that the journey is the juice,” he says. It is a small sentence with a large consequence: it makes the years spent building a company part of the reward. For a founder who has moved through product development, industrial software, and a venture studio, there have been plenty of those years.
He is co-founder and co-CEO of Invenshure, the Minneapolis company he established with Troy Kopischke in 2011. His professional history reaches back much further. Before the studio came leadership at Logic Product Development. Before Invenshure’s founding came Exosite, established in 2009, where he remains on the founder and board roster. The sequence has a recognizable rhythm. Develop something. Build the organization around it. Begin again.
That rhythm is more revealing than a collection of job titles. A product-development business, a connected-device software company, and a venture studio have different customers and different daily demands. Yet each deals with the awkward passage between technical possibility and practical use. Cunagin’s career keeps returning to that passage. The interesting work happens while the outcome still requires work.
Engineering, with room for philosophy
Cunagin attended the University of Kentucky from 1979 to 1983. His LinkedIn education lists mechanical engineering and a concentration that includes philosophy. It is an appealing combination for someone who would spend a career around products and organizations: questions about how things work, with room for questions about why. The educational record gives the combination; the later career supplies the applications.
His leadership at Logic Product Development put him inside the business of helping turn ideas into products. His recorded roles include chief executive and president across a period running from 1986 to 2008. That is a substantial stretch of working life before Invenshure enters the picture. The studio co-founder arrived with experience running an operating business, rather than only evaluating one from a distance.
An unusually concrete glimpse of his product-design thinking appears in a 2002 court opinion involving telecommunications equipment. Cunagin contributed an expert assessment of fiber-optic cable-management products. The practical detail was where the equipment sat: overhead, installed at telecommunications sites, where observers would see its underside. Assessing the design required considering the object as people encountered it in use.
There is something pleasantly unglamorous about that detail. A product may look one way on a table and another way above someone’s head. Context changes the view. In this instance, the task involved the perspective of an ordinary observer and purchaser, rather than a designer’s preferred presentation. It is a useful early scene in a career that would keep bringing technical ideas into contact with customers.
When the machine has something to say
Exosite gives the story a different kind of machinery. Founded in 2009, the company makes industrial Internet of Things software. Cunagin, Kopischke, and Hans Rempel appear among its founders. Its work concerns the difficulties of managing devices in the field, updating them remotely, and getting useful data out of products. The equipment is physical; much of the work needed to connect it is software.
The applications have the practical flavor of a factory floor: tracking assets, automating operations, and anticipating maintenance. Invenshure’s description of Exosite emphasizes collecting, analyzing, and sharing information in forms customers can use. There is a business question beneath that technical description. Once equipment can produce information, what will its owner do with it? A connection earns its keep through the decisions it makes possible.
For Cunagin, Exosite is a documented connection between a product-development background and an enterprise software business. His current listing is founder and board member. The company’s Minneapolis headquarters and Taipei regional office also give that connection an international dimension. The company describes its roots in manufacturing and engineering, with customers working around pumps, agricultural equipment, water systems, and industrial machinery.
These are objects with jobs to do. Their owners need equipment to keep working, and software has to fit around that requirement. Exosite’s account of its work includes both infrastructure and deployment strategy. That combination makes the company a useful chapter in Cunagin’s story: the technical system and the commercial arrangement have to function together. A working sensor is the beginning of the conversation.
A career in three chapters
Selected milestones. Dates describe different roles and company events.
Two names on the door
Invenshure’s co-CEO arrangement puts Cunagin’s continuing partnership with Kopischke in plain sight. Both are founders. Both hold the executive title. Their names also recur in Exosite’s history. The partnership provides continuity across companies, rather than belonging to one isolated venture. It is one of the clearest personal connections in Cunagin’s public professional life.
In 2015, Kopischke received the Impact Entrepreneur Award from Entrepreneurs’ Organization Minnesota. Cunagin’s response praised the combination of technical understanding and interpersonal ability in his longtime partner. He singled out the capacity to build companies while leading diverse teams. It is a revealing choice of praise. The technology mattered, and so did the ability to get people working around it.
Cunagin’s own published leadership statement places goodwill and enjoyment alongside persistence. He describes staying with a problem until it is solved, while preserving both. That qualification gives his cheerful mantra some substance. Working hard is easy to put in a mission statement. Keeping the people involved willing to continue is a more demanding proposition.
A shared executive title cannot explain every decision inside a partnership. The visible record does show two people continuing to found and lead businesses together, with Cunagin publicly valuing his partner’s technical and human abilities. The emphasis is consistent with the sort of work a studio takes on. Ideas need expertise, but companies require sustained cooperation.
“My mantra is that the journey is the juice.”
Danny Cunagin
The business beneath the business
Invenshure’s operating model supplies some detail behind the title of company builder. Its in-house scientists and engineers work with intellectual property to launch and develop businesses. Alongside that work, the studio offers professional services. The list includes software engineering, data science, finance, accounting, operations, sales, and marketing. These are the jobs that turn a company from a name into an organization.
The explanation for offering those services is refreshingly practical. Invenshure says external projects help smooth uneven demand for its staff. Work for portfolio companies covers overhead, allowing outside services to be priced closer to variable costs. It is a small piece of operating arithmetic, and a useful reminder that a company devoted to starting companies must also manage its own resources.
Its service list ranges from establishing business entities and corporate governance to cash-flow management and preparation for acquisitions. A promising idea has to pass through these ordinary obligations. Someone needs to keep the accounts. Someone needs to manage the project. The vocabulary is less festive than a launch announcement, but a launch announcement rarely pays an invoice.
Invenshure’s stated culture makes a related argument about how people work together. It emphasizes accountability, open sharing of ideas, collaboration, and a willingness to follow evidence through detours and failure. Those are organizational commitments, rather than a private personality portrait of Cunagin. They provide the working context for his own insistence that persistence should leave goodwill intact.
The team around the founders gives those services specific names and responsibilities. Invenshure lists Luke Buer as director of engineering, Dan Torgerson as director of product, and Meghan Fafinski as director of operations. Neal Meyer is listed as managing director and chief financial officer. Engineering, product, operations, and finance appear together in the same organization. For a reader following Cunagin’s career, that roster makes the studio easier to picture: a group with defined jobs, carrying out the work around the founders’ ideas and decisions.
A cheerful journey still needs solid ground
In 2022, a tougher investment climate brought out a more spare formulation from Cunagin. “I think that your fundamentals have to be really solid, your team has to be really solid,” he said. The sentence has none of the buoyancy of juice. It concerns the people and business underneath the pitch, and what they can withstand when money becomes harder to secure.
The two statements sit comfortably together. Enjoyment can help explain why someone returns to company building. Fundamentals determine whether the company has a sound basis for continuing. Cunagin’s public comments make room for both. A founder can like the journey and still have to answer questions about the vehicle.
His current roles keep the story open. Invenshure continues to list him beside Kopischke as co-founder and co-CEO. Exosite continues to list him among its founders and board members. The product-development years remain visible behind those roles, connecting an engineer’s education to the work of organizing people, technology, and money around a business.
The phrase that began the story survives the details. There are devices to connect, teams to assemble, accounts to manage, and problems that will take longer than the first conversation suggests. Cunagin has built a career around returning to that unfinished work. For someone who finds satisfaction in the making, another beginning has a fairly obvious attraction.