Adam Pisoni

Last updated

Adam Pisoni
Adam Pisoni Yammer co-founder CTO.jpg
Pisoni in August 2013
Born
OccupationTech entrepreneur
Known forCo-founder of Yammer

Adam Pisoni is an American entrepreneur and the founder of Abl Schools, a San Francisco-based company which makes educational resource management software. He was previously the co-founder of enterprise social network firm Yammer which was acquired by Microsoft in 2012 for $1.2 billion. Pisoni also served as a Senior Software Engineer at Geni from 2007 to 2008 and Director of Web Engineering at Shopzilla from 2004 to 2007. He also founded web design company Cnation in 1995. [1]

Contents

Early life

Pisoni was born in Long Island, New York. When he was four, his family moved to Phoenix, Arizona, where he dropped out of high school in his junior year and enrolled at Scottsdale College. [2] However, during his first year at Scottsdale, he decided to start a business. [3] [4]

Career

In 1995, he co-founded Cnation, a web development firm. At Cnation, Pisoni served as CTO from December 1995 to September 2002. However, after the dotcom bubble burst, many of Cnation's clients went out of business or cut back on expenditures, which led to Cnation's failure. [5]

In 2004, Pisoni was the Director of Web Engineering at Shopzilla, formerly known as Bizrate.com. At Shopzilla, he helped with product development and systems architecture. [6] [7]

Yammer

After a brief stint at Geni.com as a software engineer, [8] Pisoni went on to co-found Yammer, an enterprise social network company where he served as CTO, with early PayPal employee and COO David O. Sacks in 2008. Microsoft later bought Yammer for $1.2 billion in 2012. [9] [10]

Abl Schools

After Microsoft's acquisition of Yammer, Pisoni stayed with Microsoft as a vice president for a couple of years before deciding to found Abl Schools. [11] [12] Abl Schools makes resource and time management software for both middle schools and high schools. As of June 2017, Abl Schools has 12 employees and has raised $12 million in funding. [13] [14]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marc Andreessen</span> American entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer (born 1971)

Marc Lowell Andreessen is an American entrepreneur, venture capital investor, and software engineer. He is the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser with a graphical user interface; co-founder of Netscape; and co-founder and general partner of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He co-founded and later sold the software company Opsware to Hewlett-Packard. Andreessen is also a co-founder of Ning, a company that provides a platform for social networking websites. He sits on the board of directors of Meta Platforms. Andreessen was one of six inductees in the World Wide Web Hall of Fame announced at the First International Conference on the World-Wide Web in 1994. As of February 2023, his net-worth is estimated at $1.7 billion by Forbes.

Janus Friis is a Danish entrepreneur best known for co-founding the file-sharing application Kazaa, and the peer-to-peer telephony application Skype. In September 2005, he and his business partner Niklas Zennström sold Skype to eBay for $2.6B. Friis has maintained ownership interest in Skype through Silver Lake Partners, which sold Skype to Microsoft for $8.5 billion, in May 2011.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mark Pincus</span> American Internet entrepreneur

Mark Jonathan Pincus is an American Internet entrepreneur known as the founder of Zynga, a mobile social gaming company. Pincus also founded the startups Freeloader, Inc., Tribe Networks, and Support.com. Pincus served as the CEO of Zynga until July 2013, then again from 2015 to 2016.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amazon Web Services</span> On-demand cloud computing company

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered, pay-as-you-go basis. Oftentimes, clients will use this in combination with autoscaling. These cloud computing web services provide various services related to networking, compute, storage, middleware, IoT and other processing capacity, as well as software tools via AWS server farms. This frees clients from managing, scaling, and patching hardware and operating systems. One of the foundational services is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which allows users to have at their disposal a virtual cluster of computers, with extremely high availability, which can be interacted with over the internet via REST APIs, a CLI or the AWS console. AWS's virtual computers emulate most of the attributes of a real computer, including hardware central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) for processing; local/RAM memory; hard-disk/SSD storage; a choice of operating systems; networking; and pre-loaded application software such as web servers, databases, and customer relationship management (CRM).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David O. Sacks</span> South African American entrepreneur

David Oliver Sacks is an entrepreneur, author, and investor in internet technology firms. He is general partner of Craft Ventures, a venture capital fund he co-founded in late 2017. Previously, Sacks was the founding COO and product leader of PayPal and founder/CEO of Yammer. In 2016, he became interim CEO of Zenefits for 10 months. In 2017, Sacks co-founded Craft Ventures, an early-stage venture fund. His angel investments include Facebook, Uber, SpaceX, Palantir Technologies, and Airbnb. He is a co-host of the podcast All In.

MyHeritage is an online genealogy platform with web, mobile, and software products and services, introduced by the Israeli company MyHeritage in 2003. Users of the platform can obtain their family trees, upload and browse through photos, and search through over 19.4 billion historical records, among other features.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yammer</span> Enterprise social networking service

Yammer is an enterprise social networking service that is part of the Microsoft 365 family of products. It is used mainly for private communication within organizations but is also used for networks spanning various organizations. Access to a Yammer network is determined by a user's Internet domain, so only individuals with approved email addresses may join their respective networks.

Chris C. Kemp is an American entrepreneur who, along with Dr. Adam London, founded Astra, a space technology firm based in California, in 2016. He served as the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, and as NASA's first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for IT. While at NASA, Kemp partnered with Google and Microsoft and helped in the creation of Google Moon and Mars. He worked with the White House to develop the cloud computing strategy for the United States Federal Government and co-founded OpenStack, an open-source software project for cloud computing. He was also one of the founders of Nebula, a company that from 2011 to 2015 worked to commercialize the technology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arash Ferdowsi</span> Iranian-American businessman

Arash Ferdowsi is an Iranian-American billionaire entrepreneur. He is the co-founder of Dropbox.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eliot Horowitz</span>

Eliot Horowitz is a founder and the former chief technology officer of MongoDB Inc., a software company that develops and provides commercial support for the open source NoSQL database MongoDB. Horowitz is the founder and current CEO of Viam, a robotics software startup.

Alan Michael Braverman is an American businessman. He is co-founder and initial CTO of Xoom Corporation/Eventbrite with Kevin Hartz and Geni.com/Yammer with David O. Sacks. In 2014 Braverman worked on Sobo, "an audio version of Twitter"

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tom Preston-Werner</span> American software developer & entrepreneur

Thomas Preston-Werner is an American billionaire software developer and entrepreneur. He is an active contributor within the free and open-source software community, most prominently in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he lives.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">WeWork</span> American workspace company

WeWork Inc. is a provider of coworking spaces, including physical and virtual shared spaces, headquartered in New York City. As of December 31, 2022, the company operated 43.9 million square feet (4,080,000 m2) of space, including 18.3 million square feet (1,700,000 m2) in the United States and Canada, in 779 locations in 39 countries, and had 547,000 members, with a weighted average commitment term of 19 months.

w00w00 was a computer security think tank founded in 1996 and still active until the early 2000s. Although this group was not well known outside Information security circles, its participants have spawned more than a dozen IT companies. The two most famous examples are WhatsApp, the messaging service, and Napster, the pioneering file-sharing company.

Wendy Tan White MBE is a British technology entrepreneur and technology investor. She is the CEO of Intrinsic, a robotics software company under Alphabet Inc.

David Cancel is an American entrepreneur, investor, and founder of several software companies. He is the CEO and founder of Drift, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company which creates messaging software for businesses.

Miguel McKelvey is an American businessman, and the co-founder and former chief culture officer of WeWork.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George Kurtz</span> American Billionaire & Businessman

George Kurtz is the co-founder and CEO of cybersecurity company CrowdStrike. He was also the founder of Foundstone and chief technology officer of McAfee.

Aditya Agarwal is a software engineer and customer executive. Agarwal was an early engineer at Facebook where he wrote the Facebook Search Engine. He was also Facebook's first Director of Product Engineering. He started Cove, a modern collaboration software company. Agarwal is also on the board of Flipkart.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ICONIQ Capital</span> American wealth management and investment firm

ICONIQ Capital is an American wealth management and investment firm based in San Francisco, California. It functions as a family office that provides wealth management services to high net worth clients such as Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Jack Dorsey and Jeff Weiner. The firm also is involved in investments related to Private Equity and Venture Capital.

References

  1. "Adam Pisoni, Co-Founder at Responsive.org - Relationship Science". Relationship Science. Retrieved November 2, 2017.
  2. "4 Successful Entrepreneurs to Inspire You | Blog | Emerge". emergerichmond.com. Retrieved November 2, 2017.
  3. "The Real Solution To Get The Best Work From Your Team". Fast Company. August 11, 2015. Retrieved November 2, 2017.
  4. "Improving the school scheduling nightmare with Adam Pisoni Transformative Principal 185 | Transformative Principal with Jethro Jones". www.transformativeprincipal.org. July 30, 2017. Retrieved November 2, 2017.
  5. Kauflin, Jeff. "Adam Pisoni's Path To A $1 Billion Exit: A Rational Fear Of Failure, An Irrational Belief In Success". Forbes. Retrieved November 2, 2017.
  6. "Speaker: Adam Pisoni: RailsConf 2008 - O'Reilly Conferences, May 29 - June 01, 2008, Portland, Oregon!". conferences.oreilly.com. Retrieved November 2, 2017.
  7. Wauters, Robin (February 9, 2010). "Flush With $10 Million In Fresh Cash, Yammer Strengthens Executive Team". TechCrunch. Retrieved November 2, 2017.
  8. Orlin, Jon (June 15, 2012). "From The Archives: Watch Yammer's First Public Demo And Launch At TC50". TechCrunch. Retrieved November 2, 2017.
  9. "Tips for entrepreneurs from Yammer co-founder Adam Pisoni". Financial Review. November 1, 2013. Retrieved November 2, 2017.
  10. "How Yammer's Cofounder Impressed Bill Gates With A Story About A Burger". Fast Company. February 11, 2015. Retrieved November 2, 2017.
  11. "Yammer CTO champions the responsive organization". diginomica. February 11, 2014. Retrieved November 2, 2017.
  12. "Yammer's cofounder has quit Microsoft and launched a new business movement". Business Insider. Retrieved November 2, 2017.
  13. "No More Magnet Boards: Abl Scheduler Is Dynamic, Personalized Tool for Managing School Day to Day". www.the74million.org. Retrieved November 2, 2017.
  14. "Tweaking Your School? Abl Schools Wants You to Test Drive Its Scheduling Tool - EdSurge News". EdSurge. April 11, 2016. Retrieved November 2, 2017.