Donald R Katz

Donald Katz is founder, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Audible, Inc., the Internet's premier audio information and entertainment service. In his 10 year tenure with Audible, Donald Katz has led the company to top-10 rankings in the Deloitte & Touche Fast 50 competition for 2002, 2003, and 2004. Mr. Katz is the winner of the 2004 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for New Jersey, and was honored in 1999 as Entrepreneur of the Year by Silicon Alley trade magazine Alley Cat News for his pioneering work at Audible. Before founding Audible, Donald 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. Mr. Katz has served as a contributing editor for Rolling Stone, Esquire, Outside, Sports Illustrated, Men's Journal, and Worth, and his work has won or been nominated for several National Magazine Awards. In 2001, Random House published a two-volume collection of Katz's award-winning magazine stories, King of the Ferret Leggers and Other True Stories and Valley of the Fallen and Other Places. Mr. Katz also served as a consultant on editorial, start-up, content development projects, and digital media issues for Fidelity Investments, Whittle Communications, Wenner Media, Time Warner, and Mariah Publications. Donald Katz graduated from New York University's honors program in English in 1974, and attended The University of Chicago as well as The London School of Economics, from which he holds an MSc in Economics. He currently lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with his wife, Leslie Larson, and their three children, where he served as a member of the public library board for nine years.