Donald R. Katz

Audible, Inc., Founder and CEO; Newark Venture Partners, Founder

Donald Katz is founder and CEO of Audible, Inc., the leading provider of premium digital spoken audio information and entertainment. Founded in 1995 and headquartered in Newark, NJ since 2007, audible.com (US) serves millions of listeners and offers over 375,000 downloadable audiobooks, audio editions of periodicals, and other programs. The company commercialized the first portable digital audio player in 1997, four years before the introduction of the iPod. Named one of NJ.com’s “25 Most Influential People in New Jersey” in 2016, Donald Katz was also recognized as one of America’s Top 25 Disruptive Leaders by Living Cities for his work on behalf of urban transformation in Newark.

Prior to founding Audible, Katz was a successful author and journalist for twenty years. He is the author of Home Fires: An Intimate Portrait of One Middle-Class Family in Postwar America, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; The Big Store: Inside the Crisis and Revolution at Sears, winner of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Nonfiction; and Just Do It: The Nike Spirit in the Corporate World. 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 و Valley of the Fallen and Other Places, was published in 2001; Home Fires was re-released in 2014.

Katz graduated from New York University in 1974, and also attended The University of Chicago as well as The London School of Economics, from which he holds an MSc Economics. He served as a member of the public library board in Montclair, New Jersey for nine years. He also served as both a member and chairman of Newark’s economic development corporation, and he is the founder of Newark Venture Partners, an early-stage investment fund and ultra-bandwidth accelerator that seeks to connect Newark—the home of Audible’s global headquarters—to the early-stage technology start-up innovation economy. Mr. Katz is married, the father of three children, and an avid ice hockey player.