Sam Richard is always pushing herself to think outside of the box, solve puzzles, and find complicated problems with large surface areas where her unique talents are best utilized. As the Head of Growth at unified ingress company ngrok, she is working to help the formerly bootstrapped, now venture-backed company and their team think through how to build a platform while serving all of their various constituents along the way.
Sam very well may have been Boston bound from an early age. Growing up in Indiana, her father was a mechanic and her mom ran the family business. She loved Mona Lisa Smile and Hilary Clinton’s career was ascending during her adolescence. Either way, as the eldest daughter, Sam dreamed of attending Wellesley College.
She was on her way. At Wellesley, she majored in Political Science and graduated Cum Laude. Madam Secretary would have been proud. Sam was the first in her family to attend college, soon followed by her younger sister who attended Mount Holyoke.
One month after graduation, she met her future husband who was a Tufts graduate. A big influence on Sam, he has always pushed her to swing for the fences and stand out. Everyone who left Wellesley was on a tracked job like consulting, banking, or non profits and Sam just wanted to excel and move up the ladder quickly. She’s really appreciative that he has pushed her to do that.
Her Wellesley education has always opened doors, at least in Boston. She interned at the Department of Defense and spent a couple years after college doing consulting work in public policy around social security experimentation. A lot of her colleagues were gearing up for PhD studies. The thought of spending more time in school, potentially away from Boston didn’t thrill Sam either.
She wanted to enter the “for profit” sector and thought, why not try her hand in technology. Looking on one of the best job websites of the 2010s, Craigslist, she found Ve Interactive. An advertising agency, focused on commerce and cart abandonment, she was thrown into websites and pixels and the tidal wave of the internet’s digital growth. They were measured on performance and she learned a ton from their in-house experts about how growth on the internet worked during these nascent years.
She met Dan Slagen who had just started at Hourly Nerd (now Catalant Technologies) as their CMO, while also interviewing at Uber for a Customer Success role. Dan convinced her to join his marketing team at Hourly Nerd. Dan was looking for someone who could help set up all their operations around marketing and demand generation. Sam dove right in.
After Dan departed the business he recommended Sam for a role at Dispatch.me, a company where he was an advisor, to have Sam join as their Head of Marketing. As their 6th employee, Dispatch was building APIs for large industrial makers like GE, Sears or Siemens to communicate with SMBs who repaired their products like electricians, plumbers, and other home services.
Dispatch’s goal wasn’t to acquire hundreds of customers. They only needed a handful of large customers to work with local networks of millions of local service providers. It wasn’t just about acquiring new customers but also about driving adoption of their product throughout these large companies for their mobile apps and tailored messaging. Sam worked on hard problems like “how do we make the companies that pay us, work for us?”
She loved the team she worked with at Dispatch. Reflecting back, it was some of the best years of her professional life. They had a creative, hard working team who led with speed. She got to manage and work with engineers directly before the company was acquired by Vista Equity Partners. Sam established self serve motions, established a Product Analytics function, and built Product Led Sales. Now all common “soundbites” that didn’t yet exist in startup lexicon.
As Sam and the rest of the team were onboarding onto the Vista platform, a friend reached out to see if she would be interested in joining Boston based venture capital firm OpenView Partners to help build out their product platform practice. On the eve of giving birth to her first child, Sam jumped at the challenge!
The opportunity to join an investment firm gave Sam the “polish” she was looking for professionally. She gained a wider lens into the startup world from the investor perspective. Investors are talented at packaging people and products, so naturally she learned a lot about personal branding. She felt like she got an MBA in GTM analysis and segmentation, able to see her work in new ways through frameworks, and operate at different depths.
While at OpenView, she became the point person for how developers bought software and helped seek out investments for the firm too. She authored some of their most popular content like sourcing product led growth benchmarks. At the time, there were plenty of financial metric benchmarks, but less common product benchmarks. She authored some other posts like The New User Journey: Follow Your Users to Understand how to Excel at Go-to-Market, I Asked 50+ Developers How They Buy Software. Here’s What I Learned., and Forget Everything You Know About Selling to Developers.
In summary, Sam learned a LOT about how developers buy products. ngrok came across her desk because she was helping to research startups that fit this research area. ngrok was about to raise a round of funding and she was hoping OpenView would participate. Lightspeed ended up raising the round but Sam had never seen growth numbers like ngrok.
ngrok is simplified, API-first ingress-as-a-service trusted by over 6M developers to get their apps online faster and keep security happy. With one line of code, developers can get instant ingress to services with authentication, observability, and other critical controls. ngrok’s simplicity has made it a de-facto standard tool among developers, and the world’s top brands – including GitHub, Okta, Shopify, and Twilio.
Just like she did at Dispatch, Sam made a role for herself. She asked to be responsible for their self service motion for the thousands of users signing up each day. Now Sam has two children owning Growth for a rapidly scaling Bay Area based startup. Moms, right??
Products with Large Surface Area
When Sam looks at trying to make maximum professional impact, as a Product leader, she searches for complicated products with a lot of surface area.
At Dispatch she had to balance the end user (plumbers, electricians, etc.), the executive buyers (GE, Siemens, etc.), the support team teaching people how to use the product, and even homeowners who were receiving the support. That creates so much space, or surface area, to drive behavior across screens and various points of integration. It takes talent, grit, and creativity to make it all work like a machine.
When she looks at various companies (or opportunities), Sam gets most excited about products where there are multiple buyer personas and many different, extraordinarily complicated ways to use the product. It’s a puzzle to play with!
Recently, when Sam reflects back on some companies who have let their PLG / growth teams go, it’s because the product isn’t that complicated to use and behavior is relatively straightforward to design.
Furthermore, when she looks at the type of companies she aspires to help build – HashiCorp or Microsoft, for example – those companies have large, complex offerings. Sam believes that SaaS success can be found either in highly verticalized niches (Toast) or platforms where you can do a lot horizontally with a specific technology. ngrok being one of those latter examples!
Last, from a career perspective, she thinks these types of companies helps her learn the most. The challenges of making that system run necessitate her communication to be the strongest in order to force her to tailor her audience and declare who she’s going to talk to. It doesn’t hurt that developer products (and developer adoption) are often more profitable too.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
No Linear Path to Success – “I have invented roles for myself at two of the three most impactful roles that I’ve had. I’m not sure what I’d like to do next, and some of the coolest people I know feel the same. There isn’t a linear path. It’s hard to be a mastermind about your career in your 20s and 30s because things change so quickly. Sometimes your value comes by seeing something quickly.”
People Want to Be Told What to Do – “People want to be told what to do, and that is a great way to get people to follow you. There isn’t some grander leadership out there telling you exactly what to do. In startups, everyone is basically winging it so it helps if you can take the reins and lead people forward with the “why” rather than the “how”.”
Enjoy the Ride to Go Far – “If you’re not having fun or feeling confident, you’re probably not going to perform as highly. If I’m making work personally or not having fun, sometimes that’s a sign it’s time to leave. I do my best work when I’m happy and I’m having fun with a great team”
Sam, originally a startup marketer, used to want to be a CMO. But she has since fallen in love with Product. If she stays in the early stage world, she definitely wants to stay in Product. She’s fascinated with vertical software and currently developer tools, an important tech niche she feels lucky to have found such a great group of people.
If you want to learn more about Sam, you can find her on LinkedIn, hanging out with her family just outside of Boston, or working on complicated, puzzling, awesome challenges as the Head of Growth at ngrok. Thanks for sharing Sam. Excited to see the developer growth machine you build, enabling the next generation of the internet, over the coming years!