“People are fascinated by anyone at the top of their game,” Jon Glassberg told me last week. “Trying to understand how they think, how they act and what makes them good – it’s compelling.”
When we spoke on the phone, he and Jess Glassberg, his wife and business partner, were overseas working 12- to 14-hour days on multiple photo and video shoots with professional climbers from Slovenia, France and Japan. The athlete profiles they’re producing will be used for the Olympic Games in Paris this summer.
Jon Glassberg is the founder and owner of Boulder-based production company, Louder Than Eleven. He has been photographing and filming climbers for nearly 30 years, with a gift for revealing authenticity in his subjects in a raw, honest way.
“The real look into someone’s life behind the scenes is cool,” he said. “I love that because you get to show how these people are real but also exceptionally talented.”
Speaking of talent, Glassberg and his company are flourishing in a business where most have failed. He says luck has played a big role, but anyone who knows him would point to his relentless drive and determination. A self-described “obsessed workaholic,” his perfectionist tendencies produce exceptional results.
The same could be said of his climbing career, defined by decades of high-level bouldering up to V15 – a world-class level of difficulty. Perhaps just as impressive is his volume of “double-digit” boulders – that is, V10 and harder. He has climbed more than 600 of them, including dozens of first ascents (up to V13).
But Glassberg’s road to success has been anything but easy. Every breakthrough, in his work and climbing, has come at the price of failures, near-misses and ad
Glassberg started climbing in Virginia at 11 years old. He competed indoors, earned sponsorships, then shifted his focus to outdoor bouldering. After exhausting his local boulders, where he established more than 100 new problems, he traveled the country on a shoestring.
“I would beg my sponsors for two-hundred dollars to go on a three-week trip somewhere. It was desperate times,” he said, laughing.
During that time, digital cameras evolved to shoot both photos and video.
“I would shoot a bunch of video of my friends climbing, then stay up until 1 a.m., editing. And then I would publish it on the web, which was also kind of new. Suddenly 5,000 people have watched it and you’re like, ‘Whoa, this is sick. People are seeing this stuff!’ I saw the power of it really quickly.”
In 2008 he and a friend started Louder Than Eleven with the goal of filming climbing and providing those films for free.
“That was the only thing we cared about, that everyone could see what we were making without any restrictions,” said Glassberg. “We just put our heads down and did as much media creation as we possibly could. As Facebook and YouTube and Instagram and Vimeo really blew up, we were just riding that wave.”
Their noble mission didn’t exactly pay off at first.
“We made no money for a really long time,” Glassberg said. “I worked as a full-time route setter at The Spot in Boulder for three or four years and I had all these side jobs to make ends meet.”
Back then he couldn’t have imagined that 16 years later, in 2024, he and his wife and babies would make a living traveling the globe, producing commercial media as well as personal stories – his favorite – for clients such as Google, Adidas and The North Face. Or that his work would be viewed by hundreds of millions of people who watch the Olympic Games.
Yet Glassberg’s mission and motivation remain refreshingly simple: “It’s really special,” he said, “to tell these stories of amazing people and to show the mainstream what climbing is all about, because it’s so cool!”
Contact Chris Weidner at [email protected]
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