Don Katz

Birthdate: January 30, 1952
NJ Town Affiliation: Newark

Don Katz is the founder of Audible, the leading creator and provider of premium audio storytelling that currently delivers 4 billion hours of audiobooks and Audible Original programs to listeners in 180 countries, in 47 languages. Audible’s catalog has grown from 3,000 titles in 1999, when Audible went public on NASDAQ, to more than 900,000 today. Audible listeners download an average of twenty audiobooks per year, confirming Don’s originating belief that Audible would become a daily habit. That habituation in turn created one of the highest-growth and most profitable business models in media history.

Audible commercialized the first digital audio device in 1997, four years before the introduction of the iPod.  Early on, Audible created and marketed two Audible Originals – one a weekly program hosted by Robin Williams – five years before the term “podcast” entered the lexicon.  More than 600,000 actors, writers, directors, and producers have worked directly with Audible over the past five years, creating to the intimate “Audible aesthetic” that Don imagined and described from the company’s founding.

Since 2007, when Don directed Audible’s relocation of its global headquarters to Newark, New Jersey, programmatic social and economic innovations focused on “scalable, replicable, and transferable” efforts to redress urban equality have defined Audible’s public impact purposes.  Audible programs spawned under Don’s leadership include Newark Venture Partners, which Don founded to plant “little Audibles” to advance Newark’s comeback story; the Audible Scholars internship program; the COVID food crisis response effort Newark Working Kitchens; and Live Local, which subsidizes Audible employees moving to Newark.

In 2008, Audible became an independent subsidiary of Amazon, retaining its own brand, business model, culture, and Don-authored People Principles.

Recognized as one of America’s Top 25 Disruptive Leaders by Living Cities for his work on behalf of urban transformation, Don was named New Jersey’s most influential tech leader by ROI-NJ in 2021. He was the recipient of a Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Award in 2013. For his leadership and founding vision for Audible, he was honored by both PEN America and Gotham Film & Media Institute in 2022.  He recently received the 2024 Distinguished Alumni Award from New York University.

Before founding Audible in 1995, Don was a journalist and author for 20 years, writing five books and serving as contributing editor at Rolling Stone, Outside, Esquire, and other publications. His work won an Overseas Press Club award and a National Magazine Award, and his book Home Fires was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.  His two books about businesses, The Big Store: Inside the Crisis and Revolution at Sears (winner of The Heartland Prize for Non-Fiction) and Just Do It: The Nike Spirit in the Corporate World – were both New York Times best-sellers.

Don has served as the founding board member of Uncommon Schools and is on the board of the New America Foundation. Don graduated from New York University, where he studied with novelist Ralph Ellison.  He also holds an MSc Econ from the London School of Economics and Political Science.