status: taking work
25 years of being the person accountable for whether a complicated thing launched.
Jake started in music at eighteen and was a talent buyer at nineteen, which means he learned booking by being the person who had to make the math work on Monday. He got his job at Madison House by putting on a show that did not sell, calling the agency, and offering to eat the loss in exchange for an interview. He stayed more than a decade and left as a partner and Director of Agency Development, with 100+ artists across the rosters he built and ran, including Bassnectar, Beats Antique, Lotus, Paper Diamond, Keys N Krates and Hieroglyphics.
He was part of the founding team that built and launched the culturally iconic Electric Forest music festival, where he booked the early years and helped design and curate the stages and themed areas. Before that he booked half the first Rothbury lineup. An agent who books festivals is unusual, and he is clear that it is worth saying.
On the technology side he helped build and license Madmin, an early cloud-based CRM for the music industry, built with four partners at a point when most of the sector ran on spreadsheets and email attachments. It was licensed to other agencies, which turned an internal tool into a product. That is where his interest in internal systems, and the economics behind them, started.
Since leaving the agency the work has moved through creator partnerships and brand strategy into AI. Today he does AI quality control: rubric architecture and auditing, golden answer design, model failure design, and agent trajectory review, for AI companies and the firms that serve them. Much of that work is under NDA. He is also developing deal-making and negotiation courses for Coursera, which is the same problem the studio solves for clients: taking knowledge that lives in one operator's head and turning it into something other people can use without him in the room.
He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, after twenty years in Denver and Boulder.
Every line here is sourced. Nothing on this site is paraphrased or reconstructed.
Transcribed from the source it is attributed to, with the date.
His desire for efficiency extends beyond his office walls and into festival crowds, tour buses, and even his own home.
Cherie Hu, Forbes, 24 January 2017
If an earthquake develops near Colorado, pin it on the eruptive activities of Jake Schneider.
Larry LeBlanc, CelebrityAccess, February 2014
I think Jake really worked to get him into those clubs and [earn] acceptance in those rooms.
Charlie Walker, C3 Presents, in Pollstar, 30 April 2010
Every employee, client and fan who has had the pleasure of meeting or working with Schneider all say the same thing - he's a genuine guy who is kind and keen to developing true bonds with the people he comes in contact with.
Magnetic Magazine, 28 April 2016
Four positions. They show up in every engagement.
Teams know when output is getting worse. Most cannot prove it, so the conversation stays subjective and the fix never gets prioritized. Write the criteria down, score against them, and the argument turns into a task.
When a model answers a customer, the model is the brand voice. Tone, restraint, and what the product refuses to say are quality criteria, and they belong in the rubric next to correctness.
A process designed by someone who has never had to run it at 2am on a deadline breaks at 2am on a deadline. The useful version comes from having done the job.
Work that only functions while the consultant is still around was not finished. If your team cannot change it after we stop, it was rented, not built.
If your problem is one of the four on the home page, book the call. If it is not, you will hear that in the first reply, along with who to talk to instead.