Jeff Feldman

Open Imprint and a 400-page book becomes a stack of illustrated cards you can clear before your coffee cools. That is the trick Jeff Feldman now runs as CEO - a New York app that took the textbook apart and quietly put the pictures back in. The pitch is not "read more." It is the opposite. Read less, but keep it.

Feldman did not parachute into the corner office. He grew up inside the product. He joined Imprint in 2019 as its Founding Head of Product, back when the company was still deciding what a lesson should even look like on a screen. He shaped it into Chief Product Officer by 2022, and in 2024 he took over as chief executive while founder Daniel Terry - the operator behind Pocket Gems and Episode Interactive - slid into the Executive Chairman seat. Three titles, one building. It is a rare thing in startups: the person who set the first pixels is now setting the strategy.

The format was the problem all along

Imprint's bet is contrarian in a polite way. The conventional wisdom says people have lost their attention spans. Imprint says no - people lost the right format. Long-form nonfiction was built for paper and quiet afternoons. Phones are loud, fast, and interrupt-driven. So the company rebuilt nonfiction for the device people actually hold: visual, bite-sized, animated, designed for retention rather than for word count. The result reads less like a study app and more like a beautifully drawn argument you happen to remember afterward.

That conviction has receipts. Apple named Imprint an Editor's Choice and an Essential Education app. Google handed it Best App of the Year in 2023. For a product that lives or dies on whether a stranger finishes a five-minute lesson and comes back tomorrow, those are not vanity badges - they are evidence the format works.

A New York consumer-app pedigree

Before Imprint, Feldman built things people tapped on every day. He was a Senior Product Manager at Resy, the restaurant-reservation app that became a fixture of how cities eat, and Director of Product at Pronoun, a publishing startup trying to fix the economics for authors. Earlier still, he studied at Harvard. It is a tidy through-line: tables, books, and now the ideas inside the books. Every stop was about getting something useful into a person's hands with the least friction possible.

What carries across all three is a product instinct, not a marketing one. Feldman is the kind of operator who came up deciding where a button goes and how a lesson ends, which is why his version of leadership looks less like a keynote and more like a quietly obsessive attention to whether the thing actually works. Imprint runs lean - around two dozen people - against far larger education companies, which means every decision has to earn its place.

What he is building toward

The aspiration is bigger than a tidy app. If the most important knowledge in the world is locked inside formats most people will never finish - dense books, long lectures, paywalled courses - then reformatting that knowledge is a public good with a subscription attached. Feldman's job is to keep proving that "easy to learn" and "worth learning" can live in the same five minutes. The badges suggest he is onto something. The lean team suggests he intends to keep it sharp.