Sam Smith-Eppsteiner is a partner at Innovation Endeavors. When it comes to investing, Sam gravitates toward ideas that leverage emerging technology, growing datasets and accelerating learning cycles to improve real-world infrastructure. She’s particularly interested in reversing climate change; opportunities to bring automation, computation, flexibility, and sustainability to industrial sectors; and how the intersection of biology and technology will change the food we eat, materials we use, and more.

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Sam led the firm’s investments in and currently sits on the board of: Plotlogic, a company leveraging hyperspectral imaging and ML to optimize mine operations; Machina Labs, which is introducing unseen agility to the manufacturing industry by marrying industrial robotic arms with advanced modeling; and FutureProof, a next-generation insurer focused on climate-related risk.

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Previously, Sam was a management consultant at Bain & Company in San Francisco, where she worked on strategy, cost assessment, and M&A for clients across tech, retail, food, and private equity. While at Bain, she led its nonprofit consulting group Inspire, Inc. in San Francisco, where she advised cleantech and education organizations in Nicaragua and Afghanistan. Sam also worked in product at an ag & food social enterprise in Rwanda and at startups in the autonomous vehicle and healthcare AI spaces.

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Sam holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a BA in Political Science from Stanford University, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa.