Sam started his career as a 6th grade teacher in Oakland, CA. From Oakland he went to Carnegie Mellon, where he led a group of grad students in designing a public high school as their thesis. Then he went and built it with the help of many remarkable people. Pittsburgh Science and Technology Academy became the highest-performing Pittsburgh public high school. After that Sam led an $80 million transformation of human capital systems across Pittsburgh Public Schools. An executive residency teaching at Carnegie Mellon's Heinz College, and leader of the school network at AltSchool, restructuring a national network of lab schools personalizing learning using cutting edge technology. Throughout, the throughline was leading people through change. Today, as CEO of Outside Angle, this is what Sam does. He and his team find social entrepreneurs tackling meaningful challenges and help their teams perform together through a time of unique volatility and uncertainty. Outside Angle has partnered with organizations across the country and across sectors: startups and state agencies, nonprofits and growth-stage companies. What they have in common is that the work is meaningful, the stakes are visible, and the path from here to there is never a straight line.Sam helps leaders apply the principles of navigational leadership and build cultures designed to make change into an advantage. He believes in trust over comfort, and that uncertainty is a necessary place to visit and a hard place to live. The best leaders don't promise certainty — they build the capacity to move through ambiguity. Sam has lived in Asheville since 2019 and is a dad, a basketball player, and a dabbler in many things creative. His family travels in a camper van. He grew up between worlds — class, race, North/South, urban/rural — and that's shaped how he listens, and the kind of work he believes in. His work has been recognized with Carnegie Mellon’s Recent Alumni Award, Pittsburgh’s “40 Under 40,” and Heinz College’s Otto A. Davis Award for Commitment to Social and Racial Justice.