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Born and raised in Westport, Jon attended Coleytown and Staples, where he ran WWPT and sang with the Orphenians and a barbershop quartet. His lifelong passion for bicycling began with rides to Compo, a crossing of Nova Scotia at 15, and a tour of France after graduating.
He studied cultural anthropology at Brown, where he played on the ultimate frisbee team and lived in a coed fraternity, Alpha Delta Phi. After graduation he worked for the Bureau of Land Management out of Fairbanks, Alaska, traveling to dig sites in points north where he unearthed tools made by hunters thousands of years ago. As the days grew shorter, he moved to New York for an entry-level job at Times Mirror Magazines. Alaska to Manhattan is a shock to the system; it took a year to get himself fired from a job he disliked.
Looking for work with more meaning, Jon moved to Washington as a grants manager for the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation — where he met the girl who became his wife. Seven years later he joined a northern Virginia startup, then headed to Carnegie Mellon for an MBA in marketing strategy, earned in 2000.
Post-business school, he joined the family business — magazine publishing — and transformed Architectural Designs from a struggling print publication into a thriving online marketplace. After 21 years and 50x growth, he sold the company to the fourth generation and retired.
At 13, Jon was diagnosed with dystonia, a hereditary progressive movement disorder related to Parkinson's. It began in his left arm — forcing him to learn to write with his other hand — and by his early forties had left him unable to bike, walk, or stand for long. In 2011 a Hail Mary procedure, Deep Brain Stimulation, implanted electrodes in his brain wired to pacemaker-like batteries in his chest. After years of fine-tuning, he got back everything he had lost. He now serves on the board of the Dystonia Medical Research Foundation, raising money toward a cure by riding his bike as part of his #riding4us campaign (https://dystonia-foundation.org/riding4us/).
Jon and his wife, Evelyn Rubak, live in Fairfield, a few miles from where he grew up and where they raised their son — valedictorian of his high school class and a 2024 graduate of Tufts.
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