Don has long been student of racial and urban inequity, stemming from his childhood in Chicago. Here are some of his and Audible’s efforts to transform New Jersey’s largest city and Audible’s hometown, Newark, into a hub of development and innovation.
Moving to Newark
In 2007, Don moved Audible’s global headquarters from suburban to downtown Newark, the largest city in the state and one of the nation’s cities challenged by perpetuated racial wealth, health, and employment disparities. Audible arrived in Newark with 125 employees, and there are now 1,950 people working with Audible in Newark, and many more in more than 25 Audible locations around the world.
Don has articulated Audible’s impact purposes in Newark often since then, including memorializing the mission beyond most corporate philanthropic programs in Audible’s core People Principles: “We work to improve the lives of those without privilege in the cities and countries in which we operate, because Audible seeks to exemplify what a company can mean beyond what it does. We believe in giving people a chance, and we work to make this so, particularly in the urban core. Our focus on education innovation and urban economic and social renaissance is about advancing equality, and this mission should inform and inspire our days.” This chapter from a book about activism captures Don’s focus on using Audible’s inventive capacities to create “replicable, scalable, and transferrable” new programs.
“I consider the Newark move one of the best decisions we’ve made as a company.”
Don Katz
Activate Caring
Among Audible’s high points in Newark is the opening of the Innovation Cathedral in 2019. Audible converted a historic, 80,000-square-foot church and community center into a state-of-the-art workspace that houses hundreds of engineers, product managers, and other workers.
Audible has also pioneered scalable programs that advance equality, education, and economic development in Newark’s urban core, including Newark Working Kitchens, Community hiring, Paid internships, and Live Local — now housed under Audible’s Global Center of Urban Development, launched in 2020.
Learn more about Audible’s programs below.
Newark Venture Partners
In 2015, Don founded Newark Venture Partners (NVP), a venture capital fund that is sparking growth in Newark’s tech ecosystem and rebranding the city as a tech hub.
NVP invests in best-in-class B2B software companies from Newark to San Francisco, London to Tel Aviv. Nearly 60% of NVP portfolio companies have a female founder or a founder of color, and 300 Audible employees have signed up as specialists to coach the startups in residence who work out of the 25,000-square-foot, ultra-bandwidth (10G) space in the building NVP shares with Audible.
NVP companies include MoCaFi (a mobile banking app specializing in serving the underbanked); Seamless.AI (a sales productivity company); MindRight (a culturally responsive mental health text messaging service); and 1Huddle (a mobile game platform for workplace training).
Uncommon Schools
Don has served on the Board of Trustees for Uncommon Schools since its founding in 1997. Uncommon Schools is a network of high-performing charter schools that operates across the Northeast, with schools in Newark, Boston, New York City, Camden, N.J., Rochester, N.Y., and Troy, N.Y. Many Audible interns come from North Star Academy, Uncommon Schools’ Newark location.
Newark Working Kitchens
The Audible-led COVID-19 response has activated dozens of local restaurants to cook and serve nutritious meals for low-income seniors and families and people without homes—while keeping restaurants afloat during the pandemic. As of October 2023, the program has served nearly 1.6 million meals.
Cornerstone
Audible identifies, hires, and trains Newark residents without traditional resumes by partnering with community organizations.
Future Leaders
Newark high school students work side-by-side with Audible technologists, recruiters, data scientists, and sound engineers as paid interns. Once they go to college, they receive a monthly scholarship from Audible and return to work during breaks. All of Audible’s paid high school interns have been accepted to two- or four-year colleges.
Live Local
Audible provides a $500 monthly subsidy to employees living in Newark to encourage active participation in the city’s life.
‘We Directly Invest’
In 2022, Don published an essay on how he envisioned Audible becoming a company that exemplifies what a company can mean beyond what it does. He told his story of going from journalism to being a founder in the tech and media world while also grounding the company with a sense of vision and purpose. Read the full essay here.