Adam Pisoni

Adam Pisoni is an American technology entrepreneur best known as the co-founder and former CTO of Yammer, the enterprise social network he started in 2008 with David O. Sacks. Microsoft acquired Yammer in 2012 for roughly $1.2 billion, after which Pisoni stayed on at Microsoft as a Vice President for several years. His path to that success was unconventional: born on Long Island and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, he dropped out of high school in his junior year and left Scottsdale Community College during his first year to start a company.

Before Yammer, Pisoni spent nearly a decade building web and product engineering organizations. He co-founded the web development firm Cnation in 1995 and served as its CTO until 2002, when the dot-com collapse ended the business. He then worked as Director of Web Engineering at the comparison-shopping company Shopzilla (2004–2007) and as a senior software engineer at the genealogy startup Geni.com (2007–2008), where the team that would later spin out Yammer first came together.

After Microsoft, Pisoni returned to a field he had personally left behind: education. He founded Abl Schools (Always Be Learning) in San Francisco to help middle and high schools move past the "20th-century model" of scheduling and resource allocation, building cloud software that lets administrators design and iterate on master schedules. Abl raised a $4.5M seed round (announced 2016) and a $7.5M Series A in 2017, backed by Owl Ventures and Rethink Capital Partners (roughly $12M total). He now serves as Abl's Founder & Executive Chairman.

Beyond operating roles, Pisoni is a prominent voice in the "future of work" movement. He was one of the original creators of Responsive.org — alongside Aaron Dignan, Matthew Partovi, Mike Arauz, and Steve Hopkins — an initiative advocating a fundamental shift in how organizations work in the 21st century. He is a frequent speaker and writer (EdSurge, Medium, First Round Review) on organizational design, responsiveness, and education reform.

• Invests as an individual angel at the seed / earliest stage, writing small checks (~$5K–$50K, typically $25K), often syndicating alongside established firms such as Lightbank, Kapor Capital, and Great Oaks.
• Strong thematic pull toward education technology and the future of work — the two areas his own career (Yammer, Responsive.org, Abl) has been devoted to reinventing.
• Backs founders "rethinking how people work together and learn," reflecting his stated belief that responsiveness, not efficiency, is the key to modern organizations (a theme he laid out in his First Round Review essay "Letting Go of Efficiency Can Accelerate Your Company").
• Portfolio spans productivity/collaboration software, K-12 ed-tech, and selective bets in logistics/robotics and frontier tech — a generalist tilt anchored by operator-founder empathy rather than a narrow sector mandate.