Ron Schnell

Not to be confused with Ronnie Schell.

Ronald Steven Schnell (born November 10, 1966) is an American computer programmer in Weston, Florida. He was co-founder of Mail Call in 1997 and the chief technology officer of Rand Paul's 2016 presidential campaign.^[1][2]

Ron Schnell
Ron Schnell in 2011
Born	(1966-11-10) November 10, 1966 (age 58) New York City
Nationality	American
Other names	Ronnie Schnell, Ronald Steven Schnell
Alma mater	Syracuse University
Known for	speaking at NYU (age 14), co-founder of Mail Call, CTO of Paul'16
Website	www.driver-aces.com/ronnie.html

Life and work

Schnell began programming in 1975 (age nine), on the IBM 360 mainframe.^[3][4][5][6] In 1981, he tested and spoke about SETL (for VAX minicomputers) at NYU's Courant Institute.^[3][4][5] In 1982, Schnell wrote a chat program for Telenet called NET-TALK, while at the Maryland timesharing company Dialcom; this led to helping test the BBC Micro.^[7] Schnell wrote^[8][9] the text adventure game DUNNET in 1983 for MacLisp^[a] and 1992 for Emacs Lisp.^[b] After high school, Schnell attended Syracuse University from 1984 through 1986,^[c] and was a DJ on WJPZ-FM

Between late 1986 and throughout the 1990s, Schnell was a Unix kernel consultant.^[d] He moved to the west coast, and founded his first startup in 1990, Secure Online Systems.^[10] He co-founded Mail Call in 1997 in Florida; the product used IVR and back-end text-to-speech (subscribers could call a toll-free number, and check their email via the telephone—Mail Call was before the invention of the smartphone).^[11][12][13] From 2002 to 2005, Schnell was a divisional vice president at Equifax.^[14][e] Schnell was general manager of The Technical Committee in Seattle, a court-mandated computer-software-nonprofit that monitored Microsoft's compliance with a federal court ruling.^[15][f]

Starting in 2013, Schnell became an adjunct professor of Computer Security^[g] at Nova Southeastern University.^[16] In 2015, Schnell also became CTO of the Rand Paul presidential campaign; he hosted a hackathon in San Francisco during July 2015.^[1] Schnell designed the app^[h] for Paul'16 (featuring a hidden game, vote feedback, donations, and virtual-selfies).^[17][18]

Personal life

Schnell was married in 1994, and has two children. Schnell's home automation system, which he helped specify, was profiled in 1998.^[19] Schnell plays Segway polo, and in 2007 co-founded the Polo Bears team.^[20]