CACI chairman Mike Daniels dies after cancer battle

When people speak about Mike Daniels, they always start with the type of person he was.

His niceness, kindness and humble demeanor stood out even more than his many business accomplishments.

Daniels, who most recently was the chairman of the board at CACI International, died last week after a battle with cancer.

CACI announced his death Monday night and has elected Lisa Disbrow as the new chair.

Daniels joined the CACI board in 2013 and became chair in 2021 following the death of Jack London.

“Mike was a keen business leader who demonstrated respect and support for all who worked with him,” CACI CEO John Mengucci said in a release. “He was always focused, not only on where the company was heading, but on ensuring that integrity and ethics remained front and center.”

Daniels also was a member of numerous other boards including BlackBerry and Two Six Technologies, where he was chair. He was on the advisory board for the investment firm Blue Delta Capital Partners.

Daniels was a long-time executive at Science Applications International Corp., when it was still an employee-owned company led by founder Robert Beyster.

He served on two boards for companies led by Todd Stottlemyer.

“Mike was a dear friend. There are few people who did more for the greater Washington, D.C., tech region than Mike Daniels,” Stottlemyer said.

Mac Curtis, former CEO of Perspecta, called Daniels a great civic leader and philanthropist. 

"A real gentleman, regardless of how long between conversations, he was always willing to listen and you could count on a very honest and direct answer to your query," Curtis said.

For Mark Frantz, general partner at Blue Delta Capital, Daniels was a legend, who has there at the beginning when the private equity group was founded.

"He sure as heck left our world better than he found it," he said.

Daniels received many accolades during his career and last year received two lifetime achievement awards last year: one from the National Association of Corporate Directors and the other from the Virginia Chamber of Commerce.

Daniels' career includes a stint as chairman of the Logistics Management Institute. He also is a former senior White House adviser on IT for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and senior adviser to the National Security Council.

During his nearly two decades at SAIC, Daniels was a main architect of one of the market's greatest-ever financial returns.

SAIC acquired a small company, Network Solutions, for $4.7 million in 1995. Network Solutions had a five-year $4.2 million cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation to manage internet domain names.

Then came the internet boom, and VeriSign acquired Network Solutions for $19.3 billion five years later.

Daniels and Beyster wrote a book about it – Names, Numbers and Network Solutions: The Monetization of the Internet.

But the message in that book was about much more than “Hey, we made a lot of money.” The story of Network Solutions is a tale about how powerful cooperation between government and industry can be.

Daniels and Beyster make clear in the book that many of the technological advances we take for granted today would not have happened without the private sector and the government working together.

It’s a lesson worth remembering today as technologies such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing disrupt how we conduct business and live our lives.

That was the kind of topic Daniels relished speaking about.

We did not speak often but when we did, he always leaned forward into whatever the topic was. He was consistently nice, always asking about my family and how life was going. He was one of those sources who wanted to help, not self-promote.