Joshua Schnell

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT JOSHUA SCHNELL

Building the anti-social network. Fighting loneliness with proximity, not platforms.I\'ve spent 15 years inside social media, ad tech, and AI—and watched it all go sideways.At Digg (11M users), I led the AI transformation that brought ML-driven personalization and NLP to content discovery, trying to save what was once \"the homepage of the internet.\"At Diem, I was CTO for a social platform born from the loneliness epidemic—building real-time moderation, behavioral analytics, and privacy-first infrastructure for women searching for connection, not just content.At BuySellAds, I ran product for a privacy-first ad marketplace serving 30K+ SMBs while writing AdTech Weekly—a newsletter exposing the surveillance economy that\'s hollowed out the web.I also advised Pando Daily (Sarah Lacy\'s fearless Silicon Valley publication) on product and growth—right in the thick of the battle over tech accountability, free speech, and who gets to control the narrative.The pattern? Every platform I touched was fighting the same losing battle: trying to build human connection on top of server farms and surveillance infrastructure.So I\'m building Quii—a social platform that only exists when you\'re physically present. No servers. No ads. No algorithmic feeds. No permanent records. Just peer-to-peer connection that requires you to actually show up.Digital connection should require physical presence. When you leave the room, you leave the network.I\'ve built AI pipelines, vector search systems, LLM orchestration, and behavioral embeddings at scale. But the real work isn\'t making AI smarter—it\'s making technology human again.Blockchain identity. Mesh networking. Ephemeral by design.This is the anti-social network. And it\'s built for a world that\'s lonelier than ever—but doesn\'t have to be.