Josh Jacobs

Founder and Executive Director

Josh Jacobs is the founder and executive director of Attention Initiative. He got his first smartphone at 13 and grew up, like everyone his age, on feeds built to keep him there.

He came to this from the other side of it. He worked on a platform connecting creators with e-commerce brands, whose lead investor had led product at a tech giant. The closer he got to that world, the harder it became to ignore what the business actually optimizes for. What stayed with him was learning that a teenage girl deleting her photos could be read as a signal that she was ready to be sold to.

He is not the expert in the room, and the organization is built that way on purpose. The work is guided by people who ran the public health campaigns that changed teen behavior before, and the stories come from young people themselves. His job is mostly to get those people in the same room, and to make the case that these settlements should fund public education the way the tobacco settlement did.