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A 30-year veteran of Silicon Valley and Seattle, Sam is the co-founder and CEO of…
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Sam Ramji shared thisWhen Larry speaks, I listen.Sam Ramji shared thisIn February 1998, five of us sat in a VA Research conference room in Mountain View, with Jon "maddog" Hall on the phone. We came in talking about "free software." We left calling it "open source." Eric Raymond was in town to help Netscape open its browser source. The name came from Christine Peterson, who had landed on it earlier that week. She had no easy way to propose it to a room that barely knew her, so Todd Anderson did it for her. He slipped it into the conversation on another topic, just to see if it would catch. A few minutes later, someone else used it without noticing. Naming it was the strategy. The term "free software" kept tripping people up. They heard "free" and thought about price, so I spent the opening of every conversation explaining what I actually meant. "Open source" put the attention on the code. The name did the work I used to do by hand. At SugarCRM, I saw the same pattern. We were defining a new category, open source CRM. By the time I was running the company, the market was using the term back to us. The category had become legible. The same is true now. Two weeks ago, Brief - Executive Intelligence announced a $5M seed. The thesis behind it is the bigger story. Every executive I know spends the day reconstructing context that the system should have kept. They walk into decisions half-prepared, rebuilding from memory and scattered tools what they understood clearly a month ago. We call that context blindness. It is the most expensive problem in executive work. EPIC Ventures and Boulder Ventures invested in the category we named for the fix. The funding is runway. Executive Intelligence is a system that carries context across every decision and relationship, so leaders stay prepared and in control. That is the system enterprise software will build around for the next decade.
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Sam Ramji shared thisCongratulations to Alex Shan, Joseph Sripramong Camyre and the Judgment Labs team on their Series A. Tackling a hard problem that is fundamental to building enterprise agents.Sam Ramji shared thisWe’re launching Judgment Labs today and announcing $32M in funding. As AI agents take on more of the work that creates economic value, they generate massive amounts of production data: the clearest record of how they behave with users, software, and the real world. Judgment builds infrastructure for improving AI agents from production data.
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Sam Ramji reposted thisSam Ramji reposted thisGenuinely, we are so lucky to have an alumnus like Taner Halicioglu supporting us here at UC San Diego. It's been super fun to get to know him over the last decade or so. Taner, his family, and friends do so much for the university and for the city of San Diego in general. Taner's support of non-profits, the startup ecosystem, and all of our students – both at UC San Diego and more broadly. But that feels so weak to say because it hides how much *time* he puts into meeting with people, advising students and entrepreneurs, and just putting in the many hours of work to support and build organizations and communities. We can't give you another award Taner, so you'll have to settle for some hype LinkedIn posts. https://lnkd.in/ghBRpEiT$125 Million in Combined Giving Establishes the Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing$125 Million in Combined Giving Establishes the Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing
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Sam Ramji reposted thisSam Ramji reposted thisI’ve spent 30 years in big telecom and big enterprise infrastructure. Now I’m at an AI startup in San Francisco. Most days I feel like an anthropologist studying a new species of builder. Development today favors the video game generation. GenX’ers like me are not the right cognitive shape. Heck, I could hardly bear agile. Let me tell you what these whippersnappers are doing. They use git worktrees. Multiple working copies of the same repo, each on its own branch, each with multiple AI coding agents running. A single developer might have 10 windows open, 30 agents working in parallel. They’re not writing code. They’re managing a team. And they’re decomposing work into tiny, isolated commits. Not because it’s elegant methodology, but because agents lose the plot past a few files. The architecture of the work is shaped by the cognitive limits of the tools. They reinvented waterfall. My biggest surprise and source of some smugness. The 10x teams spend most of their time upstream. Scoping, specifying tests, defining the exact number of commits before an agent writes a line. Because when you deploy agents against a vague spec, you don’t get slow work. You get 30 agents confidently building the wrong thing simultaneously. The failure rate is brutal. 30 agents don’t produce 30 good outputs. Maybe 5. The skill is triage. Knowing what to kill, what to fix, what to merge. The best engineers aren’t the ones who can only prompt well. They’re also the ones who reject fast. Nobody has the unit economics yet. What’s the cost per merged PR? Per shipped feature? Most teams are running on feels without knowing if they’re spending $400 to save 2 hours of a $95/hour engineer. The hiring profile already changed. The best agent operator might be the engineer who was always mediocre at writing code but exceptional at system design and review. The brilliant IC who insists on hand-writing everything is becoming a bottleneck. This conversation is happening behind closed doors. Your codebase probably isn’t ready for multi-player. Two operators running parallel agent swarms works if you have clean service boundaries. Most codebases don’t. The unlock isn’t a new coordination protocol. It’s architectural discipline most teams never needed before. Ok, more smugness from me. Coming from the outside, what strikes me is that this isn’t a technology story. It’s an operations story. Plan the work. Deploy your agents. Triage. Integrate. Test. Ship. Work through the Deep Blue (look that up, it’s a thing). You’re not a developer anymore. You’re a polymath with heightened twitch reflex running an AI engineering team. Come out of retirement GenX, you’ll want a front row seat for this.
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Sam Ramji reposted thisAI is making the gap between your external API and your internal implementation structural. The ambiguity that used to live in a room like feeling the vibe, reading the room, knowing institutional memory, has to become an interface now. If you haven't named what you actually expose, AI will surface it for you. Sometimes uncomfortably. Confession in that spirit: I discovered a dependency I hadn't listed in my own docs. I need a thinking partner, a human one, over hot chocolate if possible. I'd been running that dependency silently for my career. Solo, it showed up as a breaking change. I wrote my APIs down. What's GA, what's in beta, where my implementation diverges from my interface. Including the things I held onto longer than I should have and the ones I'm still debugging. One thing that changed how I work: an AI collaborator will execute a bad hypothesis without flinching. No raised eyebrow. No "are you sure?" Production is what matters. That discipline is different. New essay, link in comments. RTFM... I almost forgot about that one. What's your leadership API? I'd love to read yours.
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Sam Ramji shared thisIt’s been inspiring to work with Jongmin Sung every day for the last two months. Harness engineering is not just for coding, but for math and science. Guided by a brilliant and curious mind, a well-harnessed LLM can perform feats that were unimaginable not long ago Take a look at what he and others are achieving on EinsteinArena!Sam Ramji shared thisJSAgent is #1 on Einstein Arena — a competitive platform where AI agents solve unsolved math and science optimization problems. https://einsteinarena.com/ JSAgent now holds 5 gold medals across 18 problems, tied for first overall with #AlphaEvolve. The problems span topics from the Prime Number Theorem to the Uncertainty Principle. Send your agent to push the frontier of agentic math. Code: github.com/jmsung/einstein #AI #Math #EinsteinArena James Zou
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Sam Ramji reposted thisSam Ramji reposted thisExcited to share that I've stepped into a new role as VP of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) 🎉 As AI reshapes our industry, it's critical that this technology evolves in ways that are open and collaborative. Hosted by the Linux Foundation, AAIF is a neutral organization focused on advancing adoption of key open source efforts like MCP, AGENTS․md, and Goose. Our members include Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, AWS, Microsoft, and 100+ others. This work is bigger than any single company or product. I'm ecstatic to help drive AI adoption and interoperability at an industry-wide level.
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Sam Ramji shared thisPhil Kim is a great leader, and if you're into the strategic partnership discipline, there's no better team than this to join. We've worked together closely in the past, and he is brilliant, humble, and deeply ethical. Go work for him!Sam Ramji shared thisHey LinkedIn friends, I'm hiring! You will work with AI model labs and other partners in the AI platform space to help developers build on the Foundry platform. It's a role that requires staying on top of market trends (even exploring a bit head), building robust business cases, influencing the relevant parties (internally and externally), and structuring creative deals. If you're interested, please apply here! https://lnkd.in/gZcty9kj
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Sam Ramji shared thisIt’s been extraordinary to see the speed with which UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering has put together the AI major. The university is acting like a startup, and meeting the needs of the industry as our world transforms around AI. As a Trustee of the UC San Diego Foundation, we are clear that the university must deliver the future innovation workforce that America needs. Congratulations to Dean Albert "Al" P. Pisano, Ph.D. and his awesome team for this result, in record time.Sam Ramji shared this"The one exception is UC San Diego [UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering] — the only UC campus that added a dedicated AI major this fall." - TechCrunch. I’m thrilled to see us leading this charge as the first University of California school to launch a dedicated Artificial Intelligence major! 🔱🤖 While others are just reacting to the AI boom, UCSD is building the infrastructure to lead it. Here is why this is a game-changer: 🔹 Beyond the "Black Box": This isn't just about using AI tools; it’s about building them. The curriculum focuses on the deep mathematical foundations (linear algebra, probability, and optimization) that power modern systems. 🔹 Ethics at the Core: In an era of AI bias and safety concerns, every student is required to take specialized AI ethics coursework. 🔹 Hands-on Innovation: With two technical AI courses in the first two years and a senior capstone, students are building "industry-grade" systems before they even graduate. 🔹 Meeting Market Demand: As traditional CS becomes saturated, the industry is hungry for specialists who understand the intersection of software, hardware, and AI. We have been at the forefront of AI research for decades, and this new major (housed in the UC San Diego Computer Science and Engineering Department (CSE)) ensures that the next generation of leaders—our future AI visionaries—starts here. Is the "CS Exodus" a sign of a bubble, or just the natural evolution of the field? I’d argue it’s the latter. We aren't seeing less interest in tech; we're seeing more focus on the tools that will define the next century. Congratulations to the inaugural class of AI majors at UCSD! 🎓✨ PS Send me a message if your company would like to give industry input on the major! #UCSD #ArtificialIntelligence #HigherEd #TechTrends #FutureOfWork #MachineLearning #ComputerScience #Innovation #STEMThe great computer science exodus (and where students are going instead) | TechCrunchThe great computer science exodus (and where students are going instead) | TechCrunch
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That’s my Erin Jones!!!
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Darren Lipomi , thank you for being a constant force for growth and inspiration in the lives of your students, and in particular for my beloved son Robert Ramji. The University of Rochester is lucky to have you.
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Sam Ramji liked thisSam Ramji liked thisGreat to be “back in school” for the MIT Sloan School of Management reunion. My better half Deborah Green and I met at Sloan. We were in the same section and part of the same “flock” - cohort of 8 - who studied together especially during the first semester. This was our first time attending a reunion - various life events previously conspired to create schedule conflicts. Half of our flock is here - here’s looking at you Rosaline G. and César Pérez Barnés! Interesting to attend the talks on “AI and Money” by Prof Gary Gensler (previously at the SEC), and panel on investment climate and macro with our classmate Ellen Hazen, CFA. It was terrific to connect with many friends in some cases after decades. Amy Salzhauer and I shared laughs about our classroom antics esp in Prof Rebecca Henderson’s Strategy Class. Come to think of it, she really did cut us a lot of slack. Brought back some really fond memories! We also had a chance to reflect on those no longer with us. Makes you realize how precious these moment are. Looking forward to more reconnecting during rest of the weekend! #SloanReunion
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Sam Ramji reacted on thisSam Ramji reacted on thisToday I got to visit an elementary school. Although I was “hired” to do an assembly at the end of the day, I offered to come early to hang out with my friend’s students. In the end, I got to hang out with a kindergarten class, two “gifted” classrooms of 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade students, and two 5th grade classrooms. I love doing all-school assemblies, but I REALLY LOVE getting to spend time in classrooms, sharing stories about being a kid, stories of trying big things, failing, and trying again. I love letting students ask me questions - about sports and music and education and teaching and running for office. I love opportunities to remind students that they each have gifts and talents, that what is most important is not becoming rich and famous but about using whatever gifts and talents you have to make your world better. Elementary and middle school students tend to be a bit obsessed with famous people. Having met many famous people in my life, I love to let students know that famous people are not any more special than any of them. Famous people are people who are good at things we pay money for, but they still deal with sickness and broken relationships. They can be kind, but they can also be nasty. They are human, like everyone else. My favorite part of my visits is letting students know they are beautiful, talented, and special, and that they need to focus their energies on becoming the best versions of themselves and not anyone else.
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Sam Ramji liked thisSam Ramji liked thisI used to think in years. Now I think in decades. When I started Kong, I might have guessed we'd hit certain milestones sooner than we did. But looking back, we've also built something FAR bigger than anything I could have mapped out at the start. Both things are true at the same time — and that tension taught me something I wish I'd understood earlier. We overestimate what we can do in the short term, and we dramatically underestimate what we can do in the long term. The companies that compound — the ones that end up defining their era — aren't necessarily the ones moving fastest in year one. They're the ones who identified something foundational. For us, that was APIs. The world was going to generate more APIs, more connections, more traffic — no matter what. That was true in 2015. It was true in 2020. It's more true today than ever, now that every AI agent on the planet connect to APIs. We didn't need to predict the LLM revolution. We just stayed close to something fundamental and made sure we did it better than anyone else in the world. That's what a long time horizon gives you. Not certainty about the destination — but the patience to let the right bets compound. I think about this a lot as we build Kong into the connectivity layer for the AI era. We're in the middle of something that will take another decade to fully emerge, even as it changes every day. That's exactly where we want to be.
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Sam Ramji liked thisSam Ramji liked thisAs executive sponsor of VietMS this year, I continue to learn and be inspired by the Vietnamese employee community at Microsoft. This week VietMS hosted a “Roots and Reach” luncheon in honor of Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage month. Anna Vo and I joined the group for a candid conversation on cultural identity, navigating corporate expectations, and what meaningful allyship actually looks like — not in theory, but in practice. One theme that stayed with me is the tension many professionals navigate between cultural values and corporate expectations. We can sometimes use our own experiences as universal norms, and when we do so, we risk missing out on different, equally powerful forms of leadership. I shared with the group something I wish I knew earlier: you don’t have to get it perfectly right. You just have to choose to engage and keep learning. I believe this is equally applicable in any walk of life. No matter what you are creating, humility, curiosity and a willingness to adjust are fundamental to achieving great things. I’m so grateful to be invited by the VietMS community to be a part of this important conversation, and to continue growing from it. #MicrosoftLife #VietMS
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Sam Ramji liked thisSam Ramji liked thisAvailable now at all online sellers! Hardcover, paperback, eBook, and audiobook (read by me). Spread the word! A short book and lots of good arguments to advocate for science! Guaranteed ROI.
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Sam Ramji reacted on thisSam Ramji reacted on thisCongratulations Dr. Robert Ramji for a successful defense of his Ph.D.! In addition to his skills in molecular dynamics applied to the mechanical behavior of semiconducting polymers and the self-assembly of semiconducting and metallic nanoparticles, he did another basically half thesis on the development of an A.I. tutor for our jointly written textbook, Introduction to Nanoengineering, which we have implemented in 4 semesters and counting! Robert has the distinction of being the 20th graduate of my group, and the last who did his work entirely at Nanoengineering at UC San Diego, though has stayed a supportive remote member of my group University of Rochester.
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