Author: Toni Schneider
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Conference Takeaways
I’m back from ATmosphereConf in Vancouver, and I’m processing what I saw and heard. The atproto developer community could not have been nicer and more welcoming. Here are some takeaways. The Atmosphere is bigger than social media I’ve been to a lot of developer conferences over the years, and what struck me most about this…
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About the Atmosphere
I’m writing this from the beautiful UBC campus in Vancouver where ATmosphereConf 2026 is taking place. It’s a gathering of developers, researchers, and entrepreneurs who are passionate about keeping the web and our online conversations free and open. The mood here is excited and very collaborative, and I’ve been meeting many of the people who…
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Week 2 at Bluesky
Happy to report that week 2 has been just as energizing as week 1. I’m still meeting lots of new people and learning the ropes. In addition to spending time with the Bluesky team, I met with several Atmosphere folks: Boris who is working on organizing the ATmosphereConf (more on that below), Jared from Leaflet,…
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Impressions from my first week at Bluesky
It’s deeply fun and energizing to be back in an operating role. The team has been very welcoming and impressive. I spent my first week meeting lots of people and soaking up information, both from the Bluesky team and the Bluesky user base (while I don’t post a lot, I do read a ton every…
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Coming Off the Bench for Bluesky
I’m excited to tell you that I will serve as interim CEO at Bluesky, a company whose mission I believe in deeply. I’ve been a partner at True Ventures for many years, and one of the great privileges of that job is getting a front-row seat to companies that are trying to do something genuinely…
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I use the Wayback Machine quite a bit. Here’s what WordPress.com looked like way back when we first started working on it. The Wayback Machine is part of the Internet Archive which I got to visit today. They have archived 27 years of web history (along with books, movies, games, and more) and provide free…
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Happy Birthday Matt!
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Old Car Racing Photos
My niece is scanning old family slides and discovered a stash of cool old car racing photos that my dad must have taken sometime in the 1960s in Switzerland:
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A childhood memory, revisited
When I was a little boy in Switzerland, maybe 5 or 6 years old, my dad took me to visit the studio of a well known local artist. Her name was Ursula Schneider (no relation), and I remember being impressed and excited after meeting her. She was a ceramic artist and her studio was called…
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Are your remote team members goofing off?
I worked for a distributed company with hundreds of remote workers around the world for 10 years. The question I was consistently asked the most from people outside the company, especially in the beginning: “How do you make sure people are working instead of goofing off at home?” The question was misaligned with my actual…
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Best of
Popular posts from over the years: – Five Reasons Why Your Company Should Be Distributed: A pitch for why distributed, or remote, teams are great. – The Perfect Startup: Can a large company be as fun as a startup? – When A Company Grows But The Office Shrinks: The story of how Automattic decided to…
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Making the internet weird again
Some of these quarantine home videos are delightful and remind me of the early days of the internet when people didn’t care so much about looking professional or monetizing their content: Quarantine day 6. pic.twitter.com/er652Oy3Ki — jamie (@gnuman1979) March 16, 2020 https://twitter.com/MrAndrewCotter/status/1243539675031232519
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Bose Frames
It’s been a while since I’ve gotten excited by a gadget, but I’m really enjoying these Bose Frames I got a few days ago. They look and feel like regular sunglasses, same weight, nice enough materials, and the feeling of using headphones by simply slipping glasses on and off is surprisingly fun. I find it nicer…
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The Perfect Startup
People in startups often talk about how much fun it was during the early days, when everyone was on the same page and things moved quickly. Can the speed and simplicity of that early, perfect-startup moment be retained as companies grow? During those early days, a startup team is usually around a dozen people in size. Most…
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Magical streets in San Francisco
I was recently asked for neighborhood tips by someone who is moving to SF. Here are some of my favorite San Francisco spots – beautiful, livable streets near parks and good restaurants: Cole Valley, Belvedere St: Telegraph Hill, Filbert Steps:
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When a company grows, but the office shrinks
Automattic, a distributed company with over 500 people, is moving out of our San Francisco offices. Why? The story begins in late 2011. Automattic had about 100 employees with 15 of us in the San Francisco Bay Area and the rest spread around the world. We had a small office in San Francisco’s Pier 38 that we used…