Om Malik reports that a Yahoo Executive Quits Yahoo to work for Matt Mullenweg’s Automattic as CEO. Automattic is the parent company for WordPress, WordPress.com, Akismet, and more. The new CEO is Toni Schneider.
Now I can tell you, before everyone else that Toni Schneider, a senior executive spear-heading Yahoo’s Developer Network is leaving the company. (He has now posted about this on his blog!)
He is headed to San Francisco-based Automattic, (a company started by Matt Mullenweg of WordPress,) where he will become the chief executive of the company. He will also become a venture partner at True Venture Partners, a new early stage venture fund based in San Francisco. Toni will be joining Phil Black, John Burke, and Jon Callaghan, the general partners of the fund…He helped with the Pixoria (Konfabulator) acquisition for yahoo, and has been a key component of The Flickrization of Yahoo! His thoughtful and measured demeanor made a lasting impression, and we tried to stayed in touch since. I asked him about his plans, but Toni being Toni, politely said “no comment.? The link on True VP kinda gives it away! Regardless, Matt should be pretty stoked. It is the perfect present for Matt 2.2 (Happy Birthday Dude!) Toni knows how to build a business with handful of people.
Matt has blogged about this in an informal announcement. Seems like nothing can be kept a secret for very long around here as he was waiting until the end of the month to make the announcement.
Welcome, Toni, to Automattic and the world of WordPress and Matt Mullenweg. As CEO, you will also be the great overlord of a huge group of volunteers who make WordPress so successful. As one of the WordPress Community of volunteers, I join them in looking forward to gaining structure and stability within the organization as well as legitimacy. Congrats!
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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen
Lorelle on WordPress 
3 Comments
Thank you Lorelle for the warm welcome! The contributions that you and the other volunteers are making to the WordPress community are incredibly impressive. I haven’t been this excited about a new job in a long time!
You are welcome to the welcome. 😉
Clear direction and team building has long been needed, so we look forward to an exciting new year, for all of us.
I’m looking forward to learning more about the volunteer side of WP. As Matt has often said, the WP software will always remain free and open source. Automattic is a separate (and commercial) entity, but we plan to be very active contributors and supporters of the open source component.