What’s NEXT?

The Question

At breakfast every few weeks, my 4-year old investigative journalist would ask, “Have you figured out what you want to do next for work?” The idea of taking time off and intentionally avoiding such questions was not something she fully grasped. But, after taking off the summer and early fall, getting to enjoy some great time with family, friends, and old colleagues, along with meeting some new entrepreneurs looking for advice, I, too, started asking the question of what do I want to do next?

The Answer

I’m excited to share, the answer to “What’s next?” is Samsung NEXT.  I am joining Samsung NEXT to build and lead the Product Development organization. So, how did I get to this conclusion & what is Samsung NEXT?

The Why?

Given my background across many sectors (communications, health, entertainment, transportation, etc.), categories (creating or existing), company types (hardware, software, data), and having sat in virtually every function in an organization, I decided to explore broadly saying yes to virtually every conversation. This resulted in a very wide range of discussions from deep healthcare, digital fitness & overall wellness, connected hardware, autonomous vehicles, various supply & demand connection platforms, and smart cities. The companies themselves ranged from very small to very big, months old to nearing a century. Each opportunity felt like a clear fork in the road with a fairly clear view of what that path would become. A few fundamental questions started to emerge:

1. Create or Scale: Do I want to go big for scale or small to invent?
2. Category: Which category am I most interested in and want to spend the next several years of my life focused on?
3. Operator or Advisor: Am I interested in operating or is investing and advising potentially interesting?

As I started to reach the point where I felt I needed to answer some of these questions to drive focus, I met David Eun and the Samsung NEXT team. I learned about the vision and mission of the NEXT organization and what they envisioned for the NEXT Product Development organization. I quickly realized that those questions that felt like forks in the road didn’t have to have binary answers.

• Create or Scale - Samsung NEXT is like a Valley-born startup within Samsung, charged with identifying and building transformative software and services to complement Samsung’s global hardware footprint. We have three core functions -- investments through a venture fund; M&A and partnerships, and product development. We are building the product development organization from scratch, which lets us define our mission, approach, projects, and the team needed to create meaningful impact. But we have the benefit of scale in our ability to partner with one of the world’s largest hardware footprints. Samsung sells more than 41,000 mobile phones and nearly 5,000 TVs every hour. We also have the benefit of resources to quickly scale ideas with product market fit through offices around the globe, HR and other infrastructure, and the financial ability (Samsung made $13B profit last quarter) to acquire where appropriate-- as was done with SmartThings, Viv Labs, Joyent, and LoopPay. In categories like IoT, voice, data, and personalization, the scale of making the most can rapidly accelerate progress.
• Category - Samsung NEXT is building software and services that complement Samsung’s global hardware footprint. Samsung is involved in virtually every category that exists. The company has been investing in AI, AR/VR, blockchain, digital health, and IoT, among many areas. Additionally, we are focused on users, not just hardware, which means we are thinking across platforms. There are interesting problems that still haven’t been solved in the world around user context, true mobile interfaces, the integration of physical & digital and utilization of computing that I am looking forward to this team exploring.
• Operating or Advising - Much of the activity of Samsung NEXT has been supporting smart teams to build out their ideas through investment or incubation. The result is an organization that is engaging in feedback with entrepreneurs doing their own thing, autonomous of Samsung, all the way through to building out and scaling its own efforts alongside Samsung.

We’re Building & Creating, So I’m Hiring

At a personal level, I’m super excited to be part of the Samsung NEXT team. I’m also excited by the opportunity to build from the ground up while quickly starting to think about scale across a variety of different product categories. And I am looking forward to working with a bunch of builders who want to be part of creating what is NEXT and bringing this vision to reality. 

I’m looking for Engineers, Data Scientists, Designers, and Product owners who can help form small teams owning different product categories. These early builders will be excited to define and set the foundation for a development team that builds cool stuff people love to use, creates new categories, and invents the foundations for the future. These builders are also passionate about the people with whom they will collaborate, taking an active role to build an amazing and diverse culture filled with people we trust and enjoy to help us tackle the hard problems.

If you are awesome, ping me!