Sam’s marketing, sales and product experience spans 29 years in B2C & B2B, for startups and Fortune 50 companies.
For the first half of Sam’s career he led marketing, sales and business development for several early-stage startups in CA in the businesses of direct mail catalog, marketing consulting, online community, and web-based telecommunications.
Sam joined Dell in 1999 and managed Dell’s consumer web site, responsible for operations, content, design, analytics, and P&L management. He led the ebusiness product and IT portfolio for Dell.com online commerce and support. Sam led Dell through three redesigns and helped develop Dell’s global online strategy and best practices. Despite sales decline in the PC industry, online conversion doubled every year, and Sam helped grow Dell’s online revenue to over 50% of total revenues and made Dell.com the largest consumer ecommerce site (in revenue) at over $3.5 billion.
Sam also launched Dell’s Consumer CRM group, responsible for developing vertical markets, retail marketing strategy, database marketing programs, hispanic marketing, three-year plan, customer-centricity strategy, and change leadership program.
Sam was founding CMO for Bazaarvoice Inc., recognized as an AlwaysOn 250 company, “ClickZ Marketing Innovation of the Year” twice, and Austin’s “Best Place to Work” twice. In 5 years Bazaarvoice employed 500 people in 8 countries serving 1,000 leading brands through social commerce SaaS technology and services, going public in 2012.
Sam was co-founder of Capital Factory in 2010. In the same year he was co-founder and CEO of Mass Relevance, an Emmy-winning social TV and curation/analytics SaaS startup, merged with Spredfast in 2014. He was also co-founder and Chairman of Clearhead, a data-driven design agency sold to Accenture.
Sam is author of two books: “301 Do-it-Yourself Marketing Ideas” and “How to Market With Computer User Groups“. Sam is also co-founder of Spinach, a growth acceleration consultancy. Sam is a frequent contributor to magazines and presents on ecommerce, word of mouth marketing, change leadership, and scaling startups.
Today Sam is co-founder and Chairman of Fair Worlds, an immersive reality agency and consultancy. He’s also an active motorsports enthusiast and co-owner of Texas Drift Academy. And he is on the board of directors of Interplay Learning and Axial Commerce, and an investor in several Austin startups through Decker Growth Ventures.
