Isaac Oates, Urbanism Fellow

Isaac Oates is the Urbanism Fellow at Tech:NYC. He is also the Executive Chair of Justworks, which he founded in 2013. Isaac is pursuing an M.A. in Political Science from the CUNY Graduate Center. 

Before founding Justworks, Isaac served as Vice President, Special Projects with Etsy Inc., where he led the development of Etsy’s Direct Checkout platform. He joined Etsy as part of the acquisition of his company Adtuitive, which he co-founded in 2008. Isaac served for 12 years in the Army National Guard and U.S. Army Reserve as a Military Intelligence Officer. He attained the rank of Captain and was awarded the Army Commendation Medal. He began his professional career as a software engineer for Amazon, Yahoo!, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and Lucent Technologies.

Isaac earned his MBA from Cornell University and his B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was a James Scholar. He serves as an independent director with Fohr. He was recognized as EY’s 2018 SaaS Entrepreneur of the Year and is Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute. He lives in New York City with his family.