About John Tornow

I'm a founder, builder, and technology leader. I'm currently the Chief Technology Officer of Puck, the media company covering the inside story of Hollywood, Wall Street, Washington, and Silicon Valley. I arrived there by building: I was the founding CTO of Air Mail, the digital weekly I helped start in 2018 with Graydon Carter and Alessandra Stanley, where I built the entire technology platform from scratch and scaled the business from zero to hundreds of thousands of subscribers and an acquisition by Puck in 2025. Before that, I co-founded ZIG Media, acquired by Valence Media in 2019.

I work best in the earliest stages, when nothing is figured out yet. No roadmap, no revenue, no business model. I help shape the product from high-level vision and user experience down to the database schema, and I stay through scale: subscription and payments systems handling eight-figure revenue, email infrastructure delivering millions of messages weekly at 99.99% deliverability, platforms reaching millions of people in public, every day.

These days, much of my energy goes into AI. I've led our transformation into an AI-first company and built the internal platform behind it: agentic pipelines and design tools, grounded in our own data, that let a deliberately small team plan, design, and build production-grade systems that would normally take an organization several times the size. This is not a side interest. It has changed how I build everything.

My style reflects the best of startup energy and drive, but with a calm, focused pace. I create environments where talented people can do their best work: fewer meetings, more trust, and space to explore and execute. I believe in ruthless simplicity, rapid iteration, and delivering value early and often. No bloated processes. Just thoughtful experiments and continuous learning.

This is my personal site and little corner of the web. I blog here, and on my development-focused blog, from time to time. If you're curious on what I'm up to now-ish, check out the Now page here.

Thanks for stopping by. ✌️

Contact

The best way to reach me is by emailing me at tornow [at] hey [dot] com. I’ll do my best to reply. You can also find me on LinkedIn here, if that’s your jam.

Be cool.

All photos are Creative Commons, Non-commercial. If you’d like to use any of my photos, feel free. I’d love to hear about it if you do, but no pressure.

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