Don’s Bio
Don Katz is the founder of Audible, Inc., the leading creator and provider of premium audio storytelling. Don served as CEO of Audible from the company’s founding until 2020, when he moved into an executive chairman and then an advisory role. Prior to founding Audible, Don was an award-winning journalist and author for twenty years.
Building Audible
Founded in 1995 and headquartered in Newark, New Jersey since 2007, Audible serves many millions of listeners in 46 languages and offers over 800,000 downloadable audiobooks, Audible Originals (including Audible Theater and Audible Words + Music programming), and podcasts. The company, under Don’s leadership, commercialized the first portable digital audio player in 1997, four years before the introduction of the iPod. Audible was publicly traded on NASDAQ, until it was acquired by Amazon in 2008.
Audible has become a ubiquitous global brand under Don’s leadership, and its independent brand, business model, and culture within the larger Amazon family of companies is studied and lauded as a model for subsidiaries.
Recognized as one of America’s Top 25 Disruptive Leaders by Living Cities for his work on behalf of urban transformation in Newark, Don 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. In 2022, Don was named a PEN America Business Visionary Honoree and received the Innovator Tribute at the Gotham Awards.
Social Impact Work
Don moved Audible’s global headquarters from suburban New Jersey to downtown Newark, the largest city in the state, in 2007. Don has been committed to the Brick City’s comeback, making it a defining mission for Audible.
Don 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. The fund's inaugural accelerator class launched in September 2016.
Writing Career
During his years as a professional writer, Don 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). Don also served as a contributing editor for Rolling Stone, Esquire, Outside, Sports Illustrated, Men’s Journal, and Worth. A two-volume collection of Don’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. In 2022, his chapter on how companies can promote social change appeared in Steve Fiffer’s book The Moment: Changemakers on Why and How They Joined the Fight for Social Justice. Don’s work won a National Magazine Award, an Overseas Press Club Award, and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Nonfiction and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, among other prizes.
Education & Personal History
Don graduated in 1974 from New York University, where he studied under the novelist Ralph Ellison. Don attributes his mission and vision for Audible—to elevate the power of listening alongside books, film, and music—to Ellison, who emphasized the role of oral and vernacular culture as a fundamental underpinning of American literature. Don also attended the University of Chicago and the London School of Economics, from which he holds an M.Sc. in Economics.
Don served as a member of the public library board in Montclair, New Jersey for nine years and has been 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.
Don is married, the father of three children, and an avid ice hockey player.
Video Gallery
Don and Chef Marcus Samuelsson Discuss Audible Original Launch
Don hosted noted Chef Marcus Samuelsson for a discussion at the Montclair Film Festival. The event coincided with the launch of Samuelsson’s eight-part Audible Original “Seat at the Table,” exploring the stories behind eight seminal locations in American restaurant history. [1 hour, 20 min. video]
Renowned Physicist Brian Greene Interviews Don on Starting an Audiobook Empire
Brian Greene, a theoretical physicist at Columbia University, sat down with Don during the 2023 Aspen Ideas Festival to talk about building Audible from the ground up, surviving the dot-com bubble and how Audible leads with visions of the possible every day. [46 min. video]
Don, Audible, and City of Newark Unveil Harriet Tubman Monument
On March 9th, 2023, Don, Newark Mayor Ras J. Baraka, the City of Newark, Queen Latifah, and Audible joined together to unveil Newark’s new monument honoring Harriet Tubman and her legacy, as well as Newark’s role in the Underground Railroad and the Black liberation movement. [1 hour, 24 min. video]