Don Katz

Don Katz is the founder of Audible, Inc., the leading provider of premium digital spoken audio information and entertainment. Prior to founding Audible, Katz was a journalist and author for twenty years; his work won a National Magazine Award, an Overseas Press Club Award, the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, among other prizes.

Founded in 1995 and headquartered in Newark, New Jersey since 2007, Audible serves millions of listeners and offers over 750,000 downloadable Audible Originals, audiobooks, audio editions of periodicals, and other programs. The company, under Katz’s leadership, commercialized the first portable digital audio player in 1997, four years before the introduction of the iPod. Audible operates its audio services beyond the United States, including the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, France, Japan, Italy, Canada, India, and Spain. Audible was publicly traded on NASDAQ, until it was acquired by Amazon in 2008.

Recognized as one of America’s Top 25 Disruptive Leaders by Living Cities for his work on behalf of urban transformation in Newark, Katz was named New Jersey’s most influential tech leader by ROI-NJ in 2021 and was also named No. 7 on the 2020 NJBiz Power 100 list. He was the recipient of the Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Award.

During his years as a professional writer, Katz wrote The Big Store: Inside the Crisis and Revolution at Sears (1987); Home Fires: An Intimate Portrait of One Middle-Class Family in Postwar America (1992); and Just Do It: The Nike Spirit in the Corporate World (1994). Katz also served as a contributing editor for Rolling Stone, Esquire, Outside, Sports Illustrated, Men’s Journal, and Worth. A two-volume collection of Katz’s magazine stories, King of the Ferret Leggers and Other True Stories and Valley of the Fallen and Other Places, was published in 2001; Home Fires was re-released in 2014.

Katz graduated in 1974 from New York University, where he studied under the novelist Ralph Ellison; he attributes his fascination with audio to Ellison, who emphasized the role of oral and vernacular culture as a fundamental underpinning of American literature. Katz also attended the University of Chicago and the London School of Economics, from which he holds an M.Sc. in Economics. He served as a member of the public library board in Montclair, New Jersey for nine years and on the board of Uncommon Schools, a nonprofit organization that manages several of the most outstanding urban college preparatory charter schools in the Northeast, since the organization was founded in 1997. He is also the founder of Newark Venture Partners, a social impact early-stage investment fund and ultra-bandwidth accelerator that seeks to connect Newark—Audible’s global headquarters—to the early-stage technology start-up innovation economy.

Katz is married, the father of three children, and an avid ice hockey player.