# Jason Crawford

*1970–present*

Jason Crawford is the founder of [The Roots of Progress](https://rootsofprogress.org/), where he writes and speaks about the history of technology and the philosophy of progress. He is also the creator of [Progress Studies for Young Scholars](https://bigthink.com/people/jason-crawford/Progress%20Studies%20for%20Young%20Scholars), an online learning program for high schoolers; and a part-time adviser and technical consultant to Our World in Data, an Oxford-based non-profit for research and data on global development.

Previously, he spent 18 years as a software engineer, engineering manager, and startup founder. From 2013–2018, he was co-founder & CEO of Fieldbook, a hybrid spreadsheet-database. He has also been an engineering manager at Flexport, Amazon, and Groupon, and a co-founder or early employee at other startups. Before that, he was a research engineer at D. E. Shaw Research, working on a new supercomputing architecture for computational biochemistry.

## Quotations

- We have energy. It must be directed