By Donald Katz

Audible.com came to Newark in 2007 with 125 employees, and we will have 600 in Newark by the end of 2013. We moved our U.S. headquarters here because we wanted to combine our missionary, technology-driven company culture with a great city's transformation — and the experiment, insofar as our internal culture is concerned, has been a success. I am proud of our embrace of Newark.

But I worry. I worry that there has not been an influx of other tech-driven, job-growth economy companies like Audible since we arrived. I worry about the absence of the kinds of jobs that young graduates like our Newark-born Audible Scholars, who worked for us as paid interns before going to college, will actually want, and that we will lose the human capital we’re generating through the tremendous and measurable gains made by our urban education reforms.

And I worry when I see an assertion by the New York Venture Capital Association that since Audible moved to Newark in 2007, 922 start-ups funded by bona fide venture capitalists have generated 31,000 new jobs in New York.

Vast “creative economy” job growth and attendant urban amelioration is happening by the day in places such as Vinegar Hill and Bushwick in Brooklyn — hardly privileged communities versus Newark. Catalytic social philanthropy focused on this vibrant job-creation sector is changing the face of places like downtown Detroit (Detroit 2.0) and Las Vegas — where venture capital is being socially invested to create the kind of job-growth paradigm urban turnarounds connected to current economic realities will require. Engineers and artists are creating the kinds of companies and restaurants and bars and skinny jeans stores that compose the new seedbed for urban renaissance.

Creative economy companies don’t need tax breaks. They need pro bono legal services, bookkeeping help, subsidized work and living spaces, and access to large and secure internet outlets. Newark can provide all of this.

We need law firms and bankers and consultants to offer start-ups pro bono legal services rather than business cards; we need subsidized living-for-knowledge workers and focused investment in, frankly, a much hipper street life than we have; and we need foundations to focus on job-growth investment instead of their current focus — nonprofit groups.

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After six years working with the city’s leaders to engender economic development, I have come to see two key impediments to bringing nascent Audibles to Newark, along with job growth that could lift the entire community. The well-intended response to Newark’s 50 years of deprivation is as much a part of the challenge of revival as it is part of the solution.

To redress the dire human cost of economic decline, a vast webwork of nonprofit helping institutions were spawned. Most of them are still here, doing good as they can but not providing new job growth or any support for our shaky tax base. They are funded by often-weary foundations, formed by courageous large companies that chose to stay the course in Newark, and by entrepreneurs who made their fortunes elsewhere but who loved their childhoods in the city and believe in it still.

Meanwhile, our government-level urban economic policies continue to offer tax incentives to very large companies, usually those with healthy bottom lines but limited job growth, to move from one place to another. This dual status quo — the business of the city being dominated by not-for-profits and economic development policies that do not engage the job growth economy, and public policy focused on larger companies that grow jobs relatively slowly — could cause Newark to miss out unless we change course.

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Now is the time for our business community leaders to pick a lane — to get involved in new-company generation and the attraction of young companies that grow jobs. That will help us recast the growth infrastructure of this great city and create those job growth amenities and clustering of street-level destinations that we need to build creative economy jobs in Newark.

And we need to get the message out that new macroeconomic development policies are required so as to embrace the actual job-growth economy versus the world that was.

Donald Katz is founder and CEO of Audible.com and a Brick City Development Corporation board member.