Sam Swift

I live in Brooklyn with my family and work as the CTO at Sealed where we accelerate residential energy efficiency and electrification by connecting contractors, homeowners, and government incentive programs.

Before getting into the residential energy business, I led engineering and data teams at four other startups:

  • Arcadia: led the data platform team in a growth-stage business executing on new product lines and substantial M&A moves. We modernized and fully integrate the data platform to support analytics in an increasing complicated company, but also to productionize derived data products for the new B2B data product, Arc.
  • Bowery Farming: joined right after series A as one of the first engineering hires and led range of data function (analytics, machine learning, data & ML engineering) for 4 years. Also had the opportunity to lead the software engineering and product management teams for a year each. I learned how to generalize my role as a leader beyond data, and to really appreciate good arugula.
  • Betterment: as first data science hire early in the fintech wave, we figured out how to leverage an unprecedented view into financial decision making to build a more helpful product. I learned how to delivery something useful in a rapidly scaling tech company, and how much taxes matter in investing.
  • Good Judgment LLC: Led a team of graduate students, statisticians, and computer scientists productionalizing psychology and machine learning research for a university spin-off competing to forecast geopolitical events for the national intelligence community. I learned that I liked building more than writing, and how CIA tries to make sense of a very complicated world.

I co-founded Locally Optimistic in 2018 with some friends from the NYC-based data leadership happy hour crowd. We wanted to create a space and offer views on doing work and leading teams in the data world. It has grown terrifically into a blog with tons of great contributors and a slack community with 5000+ members.

Before my career in tech startups, I was an academic in the field of Behavioral Economics: the intersection of psychology and economics. I got my PhD at Carnegie Mellon from the Tepper School of Business studying decision making, negotiation, and wisdom of the crowds forecasting.

I grew up in Richmond, VA which is a great place. I also owe Pittsburgh a long-term debt of gratitude for hosting me for 12 years.

I enjoy building things that seem worth building, public speaking, boats, bikes, getting away from it all, and being right in the middle of it.