Who is Jon Dale?

Husband, Father, Adventurer, Agent of Change

A brief history

I was born in London, England, in 1977, and moved with my family to Texas at ten. Being the kid with the wrong accent teaches you to notice things, which turned out to be useful later.

I started my first business at fifteen and haven’t stopped since. In 1996 — at nineteen — I started my first marketing firm and married Amy. Both were probably reckless. One of them has held up beautifully for thirty years.

The work

I started with a marketing firm and later founded Catalytix, a consulting company built on the idea that marketing had stopped being a broadcast and become a conversation. The good kind of client work, with people like Acumen, Martha Stewart Living, The Marcus Buckingham Company, Thomas Nelson, Molson/Coors, Saddleback Leather, Max Lucado, Children’s HopeChest, and Yates & Yates.

In 2009 I was one of nine people admitted to Seth Godin’s Alternative MBA — which Seth called the most selective MBA program in the world, at one in forty. Six months, in residence in New York, unaccredited and free. Godin has said he got more out of it than we did. He’s wrong, but it’s a generous thing to say. What I took from it was a permanent suspicion of shortcuts and a conviction that the things that matter take longer than you want them to.

In 2010 I co-founded Moolala, a venture-backed daily deals company, with my brother Matt, Josh Chodniewicz, and Michael Marston — whose last company, Art.com, was one of the fastest-growing in the country. We raised millions and grew fast. Then it came apart. Meteoric rise, hard crash. I learned more from that than from anything that has gone well.

I was part of the leadership team at And Sons — a magazine, a podcast, and a body of film work about the interior life of men. It ran its course. I’d do most of it again.

Today I lead innovation at Wild at Heart, hold board and advisory roles at several for-profit and non-profit organizations, and invest in early-stage companies.

At Wild at Heart I lead the team behind the Pause app — a soul-care app, built to help people stop in the middle of a busy day and reconnect with God. It’s past a million installs, and we’re still building it. I think about that number a lot. It turns out an enormous number of people are looking for a way back to something they haven’t lost so much as misplaced under the pace of their own lives. Most of what I believe about technology, I’ve learned building it.

For a while I was, improbably, online famous as the dad on a YouTube channel called The Dale Tribe. I’ve thought a great deal since about what it means to point a camera at your own family, and I’m still thinking about it.

The rest of it

Amy and I raised four children and live in the mountains of Colorado. Most of them are grown and gone now, which is its own kind of education. I ski the backcountry, ride singletrack, fish the Arkansas, hunt elk, and there’s usually a motorcycle in the garage. During Covid I did the one genuinely useful thing available to me and earned my private pilot’s license — a skill nobody can do on your behalf, which I think is most of why I wanted it. I will drive a long way for good coffee and a longer way for good chocolate — the single-origin, bean-to-bar kind, made slowly by people who could have made it faster. I’m an eight, which surprises no one.

I’m most interested these days in a single question: what does it mean to live a fully human life at the exact moment when the things that used to require a human being no longer do? What do we keep on purpose? What do we refuse? What’s worth the friction?

That’s most of what I think about. If it’s what you think about too, get in touch.