G’day I’m Sam

I’m a technology executive, serial entrepreneur, and a specialist in emerging technologies including cloud and AI. I can help you imagine and build the businesses of tomorrow. Check out my LinkedIn and contact me.

5+

Successful startups

20+

Years experience

30+

Investments

I lead and advise startups and business units, with a focus on leveraging emerging technologies to drive disruptive innovation and growth. I bring extensive experience in strategic consulting and global business leadership, and have contributed to various publications in the field of technology.

Cloud Computing

An early pioneer in 2006 and author of several publications, standards, and at Wikipedia, I’m now an expert in leveraging cloud platforms to enhance business efficiency and scalability.

Artificial Intelligence

I specialise in applying AI and machine learning technologies to drive business innovation and solve complex problems.

Cyber Security

Skilled in building robust security frameworks and strategies to protect digital assets, with a strong background in cybersecurity risk management.

Disruptive Innovation

Proven track record in driving disruptive innovation, identifying opportunities, and implementing new technologies and business models.

Acumino, Negative, and Founder Sam Johnston Achieve Finalist Status in Prestigious Tech Trailblazers Awards
Acumino

Acumino, Negative, and Founder Sam Johnston Achieve Finalist Status in Prestigious Tech Trailblazers Awards

Acumino, the pioneering Singapore venture studio, is a finalist in the 2023 Tech Trailblazers Awards’ Investment category, with its standout portfolio company, Negative, contending in both the Sustainable and Firestarter Trailblazers categories. Sam Johnston, Acumino’s founder, is also nominated for the Male CxO Trailblazers Award, highlighting their collective drive and impact in the technology sector. […]

Have Your Cake and Eat It With ChatGPT’s Interim Privacy Settings
Artificial Intelligence

Have Your Cake and Eat It With ChatGPT’s Interim Privacy Settings

OpenAI, the organization behind the breakthrough AI chatbot ChatGPT, has recently introduced new data controls (see their Data Controls FAQ). These options, designed to give users more power over their privacy, allow for turning off chat history storage while also preventing conversations from being used to train OpenAI’s AI models. There’s a single shared toggle […]

Faster Horses to Autonomous Vehicles: The True Revolution
Uncategorized

Faster Horses to Autonomous Vehicles: The True Revolution

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Henry Ford, maybe. In this famous quote that Henry Ford may or may not have uttered, he believed he was transcending customer expectations by introducing the automobile, certainly a giant leap forward from horse-drawn carriages. Yet, in hindsight, and especially when […]

The Delicate Dance of Safety and Utility in AI: A Lesson from the Kitchen
Artificial Intelligence

The Delicate Dance of Safety and Utility in AI: A Lesson from the Kitchen

Choosing the Right Tool: Butter Knives to Butcher’s Cleavers In the world of artificial intelligence (AI), choosing the right AI model for a task is akin to choosing the right knife for a culinary job in a kitchen. Each knife, from the harmless butter knife to the robust butcher’s cleaver, has its unique role and […]

Anthropic’s Claude 2 – A Leap Forward In Contextual Understanding
Artificial Intelligence | Reviews

Anthropic’s Claude 2 – A Leap Forward In Contextual Understanding

Anthropic’s recently updated flagship AI offering, Claude 2, comes with a promise to redefine the landscape of large language models, boasting a dramatic increase in context window size to a staggering 100k tokens. While the AI industry has been abuzz with excitement over this development, it’s important to delve deeper and understand its implications, both […]

Review — Generative AI: Working with Large Language Models
Artificial Intelligence

Review — Generative AI: Working with Large Language Models

I recently reviewed “Generative AI: Working with Large Language Models” by Jonathan Fernandes, which provided a solid overview of the evolution of popular large language models. While the course material is already a bit outdated given advances like OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 that have come out since — the author subsequently released a separate course […]

Reviews

Check out my clients & colleagues’ reviews to see what they have to say about my work.

Sam’s deep technical insight and teamwork is an excellent asset to any team. I could always count on Sam to not only find potential problems before my customers did, but to offer creative solutions as well. Best of all, he appreciated the difference between ivory tower approaches and pragmatic, customer-centric approaches.

Steve Shah
SVP Product

Sam is able to challenge the dominant logic and has also the capability to create a new school of thought. That in itself is a very valuable and scarce asset for a company that needs to sequentially keep differentiating in a highly competitive market.

Rick Pijpers
Director Marketing

Sam is extremely knowledgeable and sage about all things technology and business, and is one of the best-connected and driven people I’ve ever met. Sam continues to amaze me with his experience and I am looking forward to see what things he will move next.

Julius Volz
Co-Founder Prometheus

Let’s get in touch!

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