Don’s Bio

Over three decades, Don led Audible from an idea in the mid-90s to a global brand with listeners in 180 countries, consuming millions of audiobooks and Audible Original programs in over 50 languages. Since Audible was publicly listed on NASDAQ in 1999, Audible’s listening repertoire has grown from 3000 titles to more than one million titles in English alone. In 2025, Audible listeners consumed nearly 6 billion hours of programming. Don believed that Audible would become a daily habit, and this belief created one of the highest-growth and most profitable business models in media history.

Before founding Audible, Don was a journalist and author for over twenty years. He wrote five books and served as contributing editor at Rolling Stone, Outside, Esquire, and other publications. His work has 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 business, 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 also served as a magazine start-up consultant and advisor to Savvy: The Magazine for Executive Women, Worth Magazine, Men’s Journal Magazine, and Sports Illustrated. 

Under Don’s leadership, Audible pioneered disruptive technology inventions. In 1997, the company commercialized the first networked digital audio device, four years before the introduction of the iPod. The entirety of the technological scaffolding needed to create a digital content delivery service pre-broadband, including the first intellectual property protection protocols, were invented and deployed under Don’s leadership. When the iPod appeared, the device worked commercially with Audible via a partnership designed by Don, Steve Jobs, and their respective teams, and the partnership evolved and deepened over time. As a public company between 1999 and 2008, Don’s strategic initiatives in the face of macroeconomic adversity marked Audible as one of the few Internet 1.0 survivor companies that came back from delisting on NASDAQ and went on to achieve consistent accelerating growth.

At launch, Audible created and marketed Audible Originals—a weekly program hosted by Robin Williams—five years before the term “podcast” entered the lexicon. More than 600,000 creators have worked directly with Audible over the past five years, writing, acting, and producing the intimate “Audible aesthetic” that Don imagined and described publicly from the company’s founding. 

When Don, as chairman and CEO, decided that Audible’s public market exposure was curtailing innovation—and considering his belief that his longtime partnership with Amazon and Jeff Bezos would allow Amazon customers to easily become Audible subscribers—Audible became an independent subsidiary of Amazon, retaining its brand, business model, culture, and its own particularly unique commitment to societal purpose and impact. Bezos asked Don to serve with Amazon’s key leaders on the first “Digital S-team.” Audible’s independent operating model and celebrated autonomous culture informed by its distinctive People Principles have been lauded, studied by management experts, and informed Don’s public appearances in domestic and international settings.

In 2007, Don relocated Audible’s global headquarters to Newark, New Jersey. He believed that an inventive corporation’s capacity to impact structural unfairness would be an additional measure of Audible’s singular success. Programmatic social and economic innovations focused on “scalable, replicable, and transferable” urban equality efforts defined Audible’s public impact purposes and became a key reason mission-driven and diverse people wanted to work at Audible. Audible programs spawned under Don’s leadership included: Newark Venture Partners, which Don founded to plant “little Audibles” to advance Newark’s comeback story; the Audible Scholars internship program (now being adopted by other companies and cities); Newark Working Kitchens, a COVID food crisis response effort; the Live Local initiative that subsidizes Audible employees moving to Newark; and the Cornerstone Program’s successful effort to train community residents without traditional credentials to become high-performing tech support employees.

Don was also recognized as one of America’s Top 25 Disruptive Leaders by Living Cities and was named New Jersey’s most influential tech leader by ROI-NJ in 2021. He also received a Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Award in 2013. For his leadership and founding vision for Audible, Don was honored by both PEN America and Gotham Film & Media Institutein 2022. He then received the 2024 Distinguished Alumni Award from New York University. In the same year, he was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame along with Meryl Streep and other noted figures.

Don has served as a founding board member of Uncommon Schools for 29 years. He is also on the board of the New America Foundation, a policy think tank. In the past, he has served as a member and chairman of Newark’s Economic Development Corporation board, as a member of the Newark Education Success Board, and as a member of the Montclair Public Library board.

Don now teaches and advises students, entrepreneurs, and companies—large and small—including as an early-stage angel investor. As a former award-winning professional author and storyteller, his teachings on the management of adversity, the navigation of the challenges of timing, the complexity of measuring success, and the creation of business cultures possessed of hearts and souls have invariably helped and entertained his listeners and readers.

Don graduated cum laude from New York University, where he studied under novelist Ralph Ellison. He also holds an MSc Econ from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Don lives in Montclair, New Jersey and Telluride, Colorado. He is an avid ice hockey player.