Don Knox
Founder, Chair & CEO
Founded Civica, 2011
Don, a Colorado native and a 1985 Harris Scholar graduate of the William Allen White School of Journalism at the University of Kansas, is a student of business, having served as business editor and business columnist of the Rocky Mountain News (before the age of 30) and then The Denver Post. Inspired by the entrepreneurs he covered, he joined an Internet startup, Insight America, as an owner and chief of business development before its 2005 sale to a NYSE-listed company. While at Insight, Don oversaw the creation of the country’s first statewide real-time court-records website, and he managed the creation of one of the country’s only 50-state driver-record retrieval systems. He also pioneered the aggregation, enhancement and licensure of national databases covering professional license and criminal records. Don founded Law Week Colorado, a newspaper for lawyers covering Denver’s 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, and served as founding editor of Denver’s Circuit Media before launching Civica early in the last decade. Civica has since become Colorado’s largest association management company and the largest between Chicago and the West Coast. For his journalism, Don has won numerous collegiate, state, regional and national awards, including serving on the staff that won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting.
Favorite Quote: “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man's life to know them the little that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.”— Ernest Hemingway
Favorite Civica Value: Impact — at Civica, we should always be swinging for the fences.
Favorite Vacation Spot: I vacation on all of my business trips, but I’m most relaxed when I’m at home in Grand Lake, Colorado
What I like to do in my off hours: Hike, tour, travel, watch Jayhawks football & basketball