About Jason Nellis
The career came after the diagnosis. The diagnosis came at 19. Everything between then and now has been an argument against deferring the interesting life.
When Jason was 19, doctors told him he had Stage 2B Hodgkin's lymphoma. He was in college — Northwestern, Theatre major, the kind of kid who was more comfortable onstage than in a doctor's office. He went through chemo and radiation and still finished school. Then moved to Los Angeles instead of back to the East Coast, because the alternative was playing it safe, and playing it safe now had a specific cost he could actually feel.
"Someday" stopped being a safe assumption that year. It never really came back.
That urgency turned out to be a useful professional trait. He joined Hulu during its formative years — not with a plan, but with a pattern: find something worth building, figure out where the real leverage is, and make the thing nobody else is paying attention to yet. He co-founded Packagd, which Facebook acquired. He built Facebook Live Shopping inside Meta's NPE team, and became the company's first Founder in Residence. He signed on as Chief Product Officer at SuperBam and eventually ran the company as Interim CEO while it navigated a genuine crisis.
None of those moves followed a strategy document. They followed a gut sense for systems — which ones were ready to break open, which ones needed someone to care more carefully than the people already in charge. He's a high-context thinker who leads with narrative first, which occasionally confuses people who want a slide deck before they want to understand the problem, and works extraordinarily well with everyone else.
In April 2025, he moved his family to the south of France. Not a sabbatical. Not a midlife gesture. A deliberate restructuring of what a life looks like when you stop optimizing for someone else's definition of success — and start building something that doesn't require a negotiated exit to actually enjoy. He writes, advises, and builds from there. His two sons, Kit and Ace, are his best proof of concept.