Ivan Schneider
Inventor, author, and technologist who builds AI-powered systems that actually remember things. An NSA Northwest Board member and 2024 Got Power Award winner for storytelling, I help people and organizations move beyond AI as a chat window and build systems that run their business.
What I do now
Under the banner Model Citizen Developer, I build working software with AI and publish the methodology for doing it. The tools — SEA (working databases from plain language), FACTUM ERIT (conversational task management), and Survey of Software (a researched map of what to build with) — are the same ones I demo live, on stage. The throughline: don’t use AI like a search engine that forgets you the moment the chat ends. Build your own — a system that’s yours and remembers. Survey what’s actually out there before you build, run the big calls through several decision-theory frameworks, then build the thing.
Before this
I’ve spent most of my working life explaining complicated institutions — banks, insurers, capital markets — and the technology that runs them. In the early 2000s I was an editor at CMP Media, in New York and the Boston area, covering bank technology: interviewing executives, moderating panels, and writing for an audience of tens of thousands of financial-industry readers. I rose from associate to executive editor over six years.
For fifteen years after that I ran a one-person custom-publishing practice in Seattle. The anchor client was TCS BaNCS — TCS Financial Solutions, a strategic business unit of Tata Consultancy Services — where I produced the newsletters, interviewed their customers at major financial institutions around the world, and wrote up the case studies. I also covered blockchain and AI in operations. More than 1,300 pages in all, often working directly with C-level executives. My specialty was explaining technical and financial concepts to a non-specialist business audience.
The pivot
In 2023 I worked at the Seattle Convention Center as an on-call attendant and guest services lead — front-line work, far from a keyboard, with a lot of time to think in an empty building at six in the morning. After giving notice to build software full-time, I retrained, learned to build with AI, and started shipping. (Convention City Seattle, a civic-journalism project, grew out of it.)
Education
I studied Information and Decision Systems at Carnegie Mellon, earned an MBA in finance and accounting at Vanderbilt, spent a full year in Cornell’s intensive Japanese program (FALCON), and later completed a master’s in literature through the Harvard Extension School. It all gets used on a stage: a full year of immersion Japanese for cross-cultural fluency — and the humility of working hard just to be understood; the finance and MBA training to talk business with executives and make a number mean something; the literature degree for narrative and the craft of a sentence. The throughline, and what I actually do for a living, is communication — taking something complicated and making it land for the people in the room.
Writing beyond the beat
LEON: A LIFE is a memoir I assembled of my father — a Merchant Marine captain who was torpedoed twice in the war and spent more than two decades as a ship’s officer. My research on the talking dogs in Cervantes was published in the journal Humanities. And a project about the Faigin Atelier at Gage Academy of Art is forthcoming.
Speaking
I’m an NSA Northwest Board member and a 2024 Got Power Award winner for storytelling. Recent stages: Spark Live (NSA NW), the AI Hot Seat (NSA NW Tech SIG), AI Tinkerers Seattle, and PuPPy & Seattle Postgres. I build live, with the exact tools, on stage — and I’ll do it on yours.