Steve Schoettler

Steve Schoettler is a Silicon Valley operator-turned-investor best known as a co-founder of Zynga. He was employee #1 and VP of Platform Services at the social-gaming company, where he led development of the payments platform — payment processing, virtual-currency purchases, and fraud detection — during one of the fastest growth periods of any consumer internet company. He spent roughly four years at Zynga before departing in 2011.

Before Zynga, Schoettler built a two-decade career in early-stage technology, leading engineering and technical teams at a string of influential Bay Area companies: GO Corporation, General Magic (Engineering Manager, ~1994–1996), and Kontiki (Manager of Solutions Architecture and Senior Sales Engineer, ~2001–2005), working across mobile, security, and distributed-computing technologies. He earned a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from UC Berkeley.

In 2011 he founded Junyo, an education-technology startup applying big-data analytics to K-12 education. Junyo initially built blended-learning software adopted by a handful of schools, then pivoted to a B2B model, launching EdLights in 2013 — a market-intelligence platform aggregating 100+ public datasets on U.S. public schools (650+ district/school data points, contact data on ~1.7 million K-12 professionals) to help education vendors and publishers target customers. Junyo has since permanently wound down.

Alongside his operating roles, Schoettler is an active angel investor and has been engaged in social entrepreneurship, including board service with the Full Circle Fund (a Bay Area venture-philanthropy organization) and Indiegogo.

• Invests as an individual angel, primarily at pre-seed and seed stage.
• Draws on deep operator experience in payments, platforms, security, and consumer/social internet (from Zynga) plus a personal passion for education technology (from Junyo).
• Portfolio and stated interests span EdTech, enterprise applications, crowdfunding/impact, and games, with a demonstrated interest in mission-driven and social-impact ventures.
• Aggregator profiles describe him as favoring collaborative approaches and partnerships with founders; his board work with the Full Circle Fund reflects an impact/social-entrepreneurship lean.