Toni Schneider
Toni is a technology guy with a wealth of energy and significant management expertise. He is simultaneously a Venture Partner at True and helping run a startup.
Currently, Toni serves as the CEO of Automattic (creators of popular blogging service WordPress.com) and assists the following startups: BackType, Bandcamp, and Vodpod.
Previously, Toni was an executive at Yahoo!, where he created the Yahoo! Developer Network. He joined Yahoo! in July 2004 through their acquisition of Oddpost, where he was CEO. Oddpost’s achievements include lasting through the nuclear winter after the dotcom crash and creating fast, desktop-like web applications some time before the term AJAX was coined. Oddpost formed the basis for the new Yahoo! Mail which is used by over 250 million people around the world.
True’s Phil Black personally invested in Oddpost back in the day.
Prior to running Oddpost, Toni was Vice President of Technology at Aureal Semiconductor (acquired by Creative Labs) building audio chips and software used in video games like Quake and Half-Life, then co-founder and CEO of Uplister, a venture-backed music recommendation startup.
You can learn more about Toni on his blog.
Degree
BS in Computer Science, Stanford University
True Story
It is very much an ongoing adaptive process, but you can tell pretty early on if you are on the right trajectory.
At Oddpost, we talked to Yahoo! for over a year. We worked with them and kept them in the loop, thinking sooner or later they’ll want to license our software or buy our company. We waited, however, until the time was right.
From an interview on The 360.