Jason Preston

Jason Preston is a Venture Partner. He is the co-founder of a conference and community called Dent, and the founder of Capture Culture, a consultancy that helps companies build great teams. Like most who find themselves doing interesting things, it is difficult for Jason to explain how he wound up doing them.

Jason was born in Texas but grew up in Bellevue, Washington. After attending Occidental College in Los Angeles, Jason moved to Seattle and began working on one of the first conferences about business blogging. From there, he followed his nose: he met Matt Mullenweg and learned the ins and outs of WordPress (when MovableType was the thing), he worked with the early team at Twitter to build the world’s first Twitter conference, and helped connect Hollywood to Silicon Valley through a series of hospitality suites.

Throughout this process, Jason started to wonder at the difference between leaders that saw extraordinary success and those that merely did OK. Why did some people and some teams “dent the universe” — as Steve Jobs once said?

This question led Jason to co-found the Dent Conference with Steve Broback. The conference finds actionable lessons from success and creates an environment for people to meet each other and build friendships. Dent draws a remarkable set of participants: astronauts, artists whose medium is genetically engineered plants, technology CEOs, young entrepreneurs, world champion free divers, and consulting detectives. OK — just one consulting detective.

Members of the Dent community began asking Jason for advice, so he decided to share the lessons from years of interviews, pattern-matching, and practice through Capture Culture. As a consultant, he helps companies and teams make foundational decisions about their culture and smart strategic decisions about their products and their stories.

Jason is also a part-time lecturer in the Human Centered Design and Engineering department at the University of Washington. He reads a lot of books, is a fan of esports, and is the dungeon master in his local D&D game.