John David Risher is an American businessman and philanthropist. He is the CEO and Co-Founder of Worldreader, a non-profit organization that aims to bring digital books to the developing world through mobile phones and e-readers. Risher served as an executive at Microsoft Corporation, and was Senior Vice President of US Retail at Amazon.com from 1997 to 2002. In November 2009, together with Colin McElwee, he founded Worldreader.
Early life and background
Risher was raised primarily by his single mother in Chevy Chase, Maryland. In 1987 he graduated from Princeton University, where he majored in Comparative Literature and wrote his thesis on “The Changing Attitudes towards Language in Samuel Beckett’s early Metafiction.” After graduating from college, he worked at L.E.K. Consulting, He bicycled across the United States before entering Harvard Business School, from which he graduated in 1991.
Career
At Microsoft, Risher was General Manager in charge of launching the company’s first database product, Access. He went on to found and manage Microsoft Investor. In 1997, he left Microsoft over Bill Gates' objections to join Amazon.com as its first Vice President of Product and Store development. He later served as the company’s Senior Vice President, US Retail, leading the marketing and expanding into new categories to grow Amazon’s retail sales from $15 million to $4 billion. As a tribute to Risher's leadership, Jeff Bezos created a hidden perpetual "" on the Amazon website when he left the company. After leaving Amazon in 2002, Risher taught at the University of Washington’s Foster Business School, where he created the University’s course on “Competing on the Internet.” He was elected Professor of the Year in 2004. Risher founded Worldreader after a year-long, 19-country trip around the world with his family, road-schooling his daughters and volunteering. After visiting an orphanage in Ecuador, Risher saw how e-reader technology could give kids in remote and under-served parts of the world access to books. Worldreader is a US-based 501 and European public charity that believes that “readers build a better world.” In March 2010, Worldreader launched a trial in Ayenyah, Ghana. Worldreader reports that, after receiving positive results, they were granted permission from Ghana’s Ministry of Education to distribute e-readers to additional schools in Ghana. Since then, the organization has helped 13 million readers. Risher is Schwab FoundationSocial Entrepreneur of the year, a Microsoft Alumni Foundation Integral Fellow,, and Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation Social Entrepreneur. He serves on the InternationalAdvisory Board of ESADE, and sits on the International Advisory Board of Catalunya.
Philanthropy
In May 2020, Risher and his wife, author Jennifer Risher, created the challenge, with a goal of motivating donors to increase their charitable giving from Donor Advised Funds. Within 24 hours of the challenge's launch, donors had committed over $400,000 to support non-profits.
