Hi! I'm Jonathan.
I build deep worlds using narrative that connect commerce and community. I like to write about systems, capital, and what brings them together.
Currently
- Building Due Dilly: creators, operators, and investors to meet, build and turn chaos into insight with my best friend, Carl.
Previously
- co-founded Blavity Inc, and Afrotech, one of the independent media platforms and largest technology convenings in the US
- Editor-in-Chief at Red Table Talk
- led strategic comms at Standard Chartered Bank
- Helped build and scale the publishing platform on LinkedIn
- Nieman-Berkman Klein Fellow at Harvard University - studying IP and emerging markets
- Ford Global Fellow - studying emerging markets, sovereignty, and what it takes to build and scale narrative capital
Formal Bio
Jonathan Jackson started his career at LinkedIn, scaling its publishing platform with prominent voices who wanted to scale their influence. He went on to co-found Blavity and AfroTech, leading Corporate Brand, and scaled the organization into one of the largest independent media networks in the country, achieving global resonance. His academic and research interests led him to become a Nieman-Berkman Klein Fellow at Harvard University, where he studied how to measure cultural influence and the economic impact of that creativity (and how it is often underutilized as a growth opportunity nationally, while being commoditized globally, simultaneously. As a Ford Foundation Global Fellow, he has spent the last two years looking at how creativity in emerging markets cascades into GDP, country branding and capital markets. He works across three forms of capital: financial, cultural and relational.