| Jason Pontin | |
| Birth Date: | 1967 5, df=yes |
| Birth Place: | London, England |
| Education: | Harrow School, University of Oxford |
| Alma Mater: | Keble College, Oxford |
| Nationality: | British |
| Occupation: | Venture Capitalist, editor, journalist, and publisher |
| Years Active: | 1996 - present |
Jason Matthew Daniel Pontin (born 11 May 1967) is a British-born venture capitalist and journalist. He is a General Partner at the venture capital firm of DCVC in Palo Alto, and is a board member and seed investor in a number of life sciences companies. He is the former editor in chief and publisher of MIT Technology Review.
Pontin was born on 11 May 1967 in London, to a British father, Anthony Charles Pontin, a businessman, and a South African mother, Elaine Howells, an actress.[1] He was raised in Northern California and educated in England, at Harrow School[2] and Oxford University.[3]
From 1996 to 2002, Pontin was the Editor of Red Herring, a business and technology publication.[4] From 2002 to 2004, he was the Editor of The Acumen Journal, a now-defunct magazine he founded about the life sciences.[5]
Pontin has written for many national and international magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times,[6] The Economist, The Financial Times,[7] The Boston Globe,[8] The Believer Magazine,[9] and Wired.[10] He writes for Wired in the publication's "IDEAS" channel and contributes to the magazine.[11] In February 2013, he delivered a TED Talk in Long Beach, California, "Can Technology solve our big problems?" that has been seen more than 1.6 million times.[12]
He was hired as the editor of Technology Review in July 2004,[13] and in August 2005 was named publisher. Pontin engaged in what The Boston Globe has described as a "strategic overhaul" of Technology Review, whose goal is to make the magazine into a largely electronic publishing company.[14] In October 2012, he renamed the organization MIT Technology Review and relaunched it as a "digital-first enterprise". AdWeek commented that "Pontin and MIT Technology Review could set the standard for the transition to a digital future for legacy media."[15] Pontin was Chairman of the MIT Enterprise Forum, MIT's global organization of technology entrepreneurs.[16] From 2005 to 2017, he was the Editor in Chief and Publisher of MIT Technology Review.[17] [18]
In 2015, he cofounded MIT Solve[19] the Institute's open innovation platform, which deploys capital and other resources towards solutions to grand challenges.[20]
From 2018 to 2020, he was Senior Partner and senior advisor at Flagship Pioneering, an American life sciences venture capital company in Cambridge, Massachusetts.[21] [22] [23] [24]
In 2019, with CEO Neil Dhawan, he cofounded Totus Medicines, a chemical biology company whose drug discovery platform uses structure-based design, combinatorial chemistry, and automated biophysics to rapidly identify oncology therapies. Pontin is a board member of Totus Medicines. [25]
Pontin has been a General Partner at DCVC since March 2021.[26] [27] [28]