Shared chapter
Adam Pisoni
Co-Founder & former CTO, Yammer · Founder, Abl and Let’s Gooo
Relationship
How we worked together
Adam was one of Geni's early engineers and built the core of its Newsfeed engine—a Ruby map/reduce system he called Skynet and later presented at RailsConf. When David Sacks came up with the idea that became Yammer, Adam transitioned to the new product and eventually became its CTO. We worked together across both Geni and Yammer. After Microsoft acquired Yammer, Adam went on to found several companies, including Abl and Let’s Gooo.
Influence
What I learned
Adam is an amazing engineer who naturally thinks in systems. Working with him helped shape how I think about architectures that must scale, evolve, and become foundations for other engineers rather than solve only one immediate feature.
Projects
Projects we built together
Geni.com / Yammer / MyHeritage · 2007 – 2013
Geni — one shared family tree for humanity
Adam designed the original Newsfeed architecture and built its Ruby map/reduce core, which he called Skynet and later presented at RailsConf. When he transitioned to Yammer, I inherited the platform and evolved it into a highly flexible story-generation, aggregation, and localization engine.
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The work we shared
Elsewhere