I am the founder of The Roots of Progress, a nonprofit dedicated to building a culture of progress for the 21st century. I write and speak about the history and philosophy of progress, especially in technology and industry.

I’ve written for the MIT Technology Review, been interviewed as a spokesman for the progress movement to BBC and Vox, and given guest lectures at MIT. I am a Founding Fellow at the Cosmos Institute, an advisor to fellows at the Foresight Institute, and a former advisor/consultant to Our World in Data.

Formerly, I was a software engineering manager and tech startup founder. I was co-founder & CEO of Fieldbook, a hybrid spreadsheet-database (read my postmortem).

I’ve also been an engineering manager at Flexport, Amazon and Groupon, and was at a few other startups as co-founder or early employee. Long ago I helped build a biotech supercomputer for D. E. Shaw Research.

Full resume on LinkedIn.

Other writing

Although my full-time focus is writing at The Roots of Progress, I used to write here about startups, tech, business, and life (and still do sporadically). My writing has been featured on All Things D and Software Lead Weekly.

Some of my top posts:

• What happened at Fieldbook
• Minimum Viable Culture
• Amazon’s “two-pizza teams”: The ultimate divisional organization
• How to be a culture mismatch at Amazon
• What allows Amazon to be so innovative?
• How to work with “stupid” people
• The real first-mover advantage
• Steve Jobs

For more, browse the archive.

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Contact

Work: jason@rootsofprogress.org

Personal: jason@jasoncrawford.org

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