Simon Schneider

Simon has spent his entire life creating new solutions for big problems that most people just see as given and unsolvable. He has co-founded and grown over a dozen startups in Germany, UK and the US to over $100M in valuation, sometimes together with world renowned leaders who founded Upwork (NASDAQ: UPWK) or LifeLock (NYSE: LOCK).

Simon’s first job out of college was at IBM, implementing biometric technologies at airports and government buildings after 9-11 in New York City. However, Simon never understood the premise of why it was deemed impossible for airports, security agencies and online merchants to tap into this ingenious crowd of security innovators worldwide to better protect themselves from increasing security threats. Hence, he setup a competition “Global Security Challenge” during his MBA at London Business School to find the best security technologies that would have prevented the London tube bombings the year before. The United States Department of Defense and NATO immediately backed this venture with significant resources and OmniCompete rapidly grew to host open innovation competitions to solve R&D challenges for enterprises like BAE Systems, HP and Barclays and government entities (EU Commission, MI6). Having grown his startup into Europe’s largest Open-Innovation platform for technology challenges his firm was successfully acquired by InnoCentive in the USA in 2012.

During his time at InnoCentive, Simon met the leaders of the Sam Schmidt Foundation whose founder’s dream was to walk again after a car accident that left him paralyzed. Setting up a private-government consortium, he designed the $10M Sam Schmidt Spinal Cord Injury Prize. While the final prize has never been claimed, it played a tiny role in the scientific breakthroughs in 2018 from the researchers our initiative was working with.

In 2016, Simon was approached by the White House to help Vice-President Biden’s Cancer Moonshot initiative, which has the goal to eradicate cancer within the next decade. Together with leading cancer researchers from Stanford and UCLA he built an open platform for patients, called CancerBase, where patients upload their medical information and share it for further research. Against the stated opinion of the entire science community, we started with the (correct) belief that cancer patients would actually share everything for the small chance to advance medicine for themselves and fellow patients. 

Leonardo da Vinci is widely credited to have written the first resume in order to land a job with the regent in Milan. While a great invention over 500 years ago, Simon was often frustrated when hiring staff as their CVs and resumes where full of errors and exaggerations. The question of why the world is still using such an outdated method for hiring led to the idea of creating a better, online driven resume. 

By collecting the digital footprints of professionals, his startup Zyncd aimed to better detect their real background, achievements and soft skills. 

But Zyncd was never going to collect these signals against people’s will and rather invited professionals to collect their online footprint in this place for the most accurate reflection of their skills. His German company was acquired in 2017 by Capacity in the USA.

Simon holds an MBA from London Business School. He serves on the Boards of CrowdHut in NYC and Language-On-Stage in the UK. He resides in Munich together with his Italian wife and their two young