Jonathan Rochelle

Jonathan Rochelle (aka JR) is an entrepreneur and technology product manager. He is currently VP of Learning Content and Instructor Experience at LinkedIn, leading the development of learning products which help every member of the global workforce learn the skills they need to achieve their professional goals. Before LinkedIn, JR was Chief Product Officer at Zapier, managing the product, design and Ux research teams developing workflow automation products.

JR previously spent over a decade at Google, where he led the development of many products from inception to launch and growth to well over a billion people - enterprises, schools, small companies, and consumers. His tenure at Google started with the acquisition of a company he co-founded, which resulted in the launch of Google Sheets and many subsequent products, through the creation of the Google for Education products team, which included the creation and launch of Google Classroom and other products. More detail on these products and his role are below.

JR was a Director of Product Management at Google from 2005 through 2019. Most recently in his tenure at Google, he started the Google Apps for Education product team, where he initiated and led the product development of Google Classroom, Google Expeditions, Google Forms & Quizzes, as well as the Jamboard product, which is a set of collaborative whiteboard apps and a touch-screen hardware device. Google Apps for Education was used actively by more than 100 million educators and students globally by the time JR left Google in 2019, and Google Classroom was actively used by 40 million, including one in three US K12 students (as of 2017). The growth of that product has continued to soar through the pandemic and today (as of 2022).

Before 2013, JR was one of the original co-founders and the lead product director of many Google Apps, including Google Sheets, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Slides, Google Drawings, Google Forms, Google Apps Script, Google Fonts, the new Google Sites, Google Classroom and Google Jamboard. Jonathan led product development for these collaborative apps in G Suite from inception, through their first 8 years (from 2005 until 2013), which are now used actively by almost 1 billion people. He is the co-inventor on several patents related to real-time collaboration in productivity apps which was at the core of the G Suite apps he helped launch.

Prior to joining Google in 2005, Jonathan co-founded and sold two technology start-ups - ITK Solutions, a technology consulting firm, and 2Web Technologies, a software product company which was acquired by Google in 2005 as the technology behind Google Spreadsheets - the first publicly launched component of the Google Docs suite. Before founding the start-ups, Jonathan spent 15 years as a software engineer and engineering team manager, primarily at JP Morgan & Co., across a broad set of financial service businesses. JR is a strong advocate of innovation culture, entrepreneurship and education technology and can often be found helping new entrepreneurs or learning practically any creative "maker" activity such as 3D Printing.

Jonathan earned his Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from the State University of New York at Albany. He is easily reached on Twitter as @JRochelle.