About Jon Fox

Jon Fox was born and raised in central Illinois amongst a flat sea of corn and soybeans. Somehow he managed to give it all up and move to Vancouver, WA where he’s now running Crouton Creations, an AI product studio focused on building practical, personal AI tools. He graduated from Illinois College in 2006 with a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics. He spent a little time pursuing a Masters in Computer Science at Washington University in St. Louis, but got distracted with starting companies.

He’s been building startups for nearly two decades. He founded IntenseDebate, which provides a richer comment system for blogs and websites, and was one of 10 companies selected for the first TechStars program in 2007. IntenseDebate was acquired by Automattic (the company behind WordPress) in September 2008. He then founded Torbit, which made websites faster by automating frontend optimizations. Torbit was acquired by Walmart Labs in July 2013. Most recently, he was the first executive hire at Ditto as VP of Engineering, helping build the engineering team and processes that took them to $82M raised.

These days, he’s focused on showing what’s possible when you build with AI from day one. Crouton Creations is home to ToneClone (an AI writing assistant that learns your voice), MyStoryMates (custom children’s books powered by AI), Prompt Stash (a browser extension for prompt templates), and DevX (a developer environment manager). He spends most of his time with Rust, Go, and TypeScript but dabbles in lots of programming languages.

Jon is currently living in Vancouver, WA with his amazingly understanding wife and son, where he tries to find time to enjoy the awesome landscapes, mountains, and waterfalls. He also has a deep love of travel, having been to over 80 countries, so when the weather gets bad he tends to go exploring abroad.