Tim Urban

Tim Urban is an American author and blogger. He is the co-founder of Wait But Why, a long-form blog, of which Urban is the writer and illustrator.

Urban graduated from Harvard University in 2004.

In 2011, Urban and Finn co-founded ArborBridge, an educational technology company catered to international students planning to attend college in the United States. The company was originally a sister company to the Launch Education Group, also co-founded by Urban and Finn in 2007, but was later merged into ArborBridge in 2014. and later broke down the concepts behind Neuralink.

In 2016, Urban gave a TED Talk about his experiences with procrastination. As of 2025, the TED Talk has amassed 75 million views, making it the second most viewed TED Talk in history. In the talk, he described the brain of a procrastinator being distracted by an "instant gratification monkey" and saved at the last minute by a "panic monster".

In 2023, Urban published the book What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies. The book was endorsed by Elon Musk on X.