JonathanKatzman
Learning ancient wisdom; inventing the future.
I build products that help people learn. Thirty years of it: from one of the first tools that let anyone make a web page, to a university built around a live seminar, to AI that can answer a question about any video on YouTube.
Two halves of one sentence.
ancient wisdom
Texts that have been argued over for two thousand years, and the communities that keep arguing.
the future
Products that did not exist until a small team decided they should.
The semicolon is the point. Pillow Wrestling with Judaism lives right on it: the oldest questions, answered with the newest tools.
Zero-to-one, then all the way out.
Shipping software, since joining the FrontPage team in 1995.
Startups I helped build that were acquired: Vermeer and Tellme by Microsoft, Xoopit by Yahoo!.
U.S. patents, most of them on making a video seminar work like a great classroom.
People in the product organization I built from scratch as founding CPO of Minerva Project.
Four ways in.
Career
YouTube, Minerva, Yahoo!, Xoopit, Tellme, Microsoft. Three decades, told backwards, plus board work at The Kitchen.
↗ 02Writing
An MIT Press chapter on active learning, launch posts from YouTube, podcasts and LinkedIn notes.
↗ 03Patents
Participation queues, decision support, interactive timelines: the inventions behind Minerva’s Forum.
↗ 04Projects
ChezJK, Pillow Wrestling with Judaism, Bookshelf, and fifteen years of Paleo/Primal.
↗After YouTube, back to the workbench.
ChezJK
A decade of home cooking, turned into recipes you can actually cook. Every meal I have photographed, on the web and in a native iOS reader.
Pillow Wrestling with Judaism
Ask a modern question, get an answer voiced by sages across 2,000 years, grounded in real texts from Sefaria.
Bookshelf
Every book since 2013, lined up as spines on one long shelf.