About

I'm Sam Silva. I've been an engineer for seventeen years. I've founded three startups, and all three failed — for the same reason. This page is about that reason, and what I'm doing about it.

Three companies, one lesson

I followed the work: Brazil, then Vancouver in 2016, then the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021. I was a staff engineer on an IoT platform used by millions, spent years inside applied AI labs building agents and automation — and three times, I started a company of my own.

Three times, I made the same mistake. I poured everything into the product: the architecture, the code quality, the craft of making something beautiful. And while I was polishing, the real game — distribution, customers, people — went unplayed. Nobody discovers you because your codebase is clean. I kept investing in the thing I loved and skipping the thing that decides whether anyone ever sees it.

Then AI collapsed the cost of building software — the craft I'd spent seventeen years on — and my private lesson became everyone's reality: building was never the bottleneck. When anyone can build, everything depends on the part I kept skipping: reaching people.

Daring to Build

So this time I'm starting where I'm weakest, and I'm doing it in the open.

Daring to Build is the show I'm building now — launching soon — a curious one, learning alongside people building extraordinary things. I'll sit down with founders and ask the real questions: how they started, how they struggled, how they got seen. Not because I'm a growth expert or a CEO with a big acquisition story — I'm not. I'm doing it because I want to learn from the best, and the fastest way to learn is to sit across from the people already doing it and take you with me.

The ambition behind it is simple, and I mean it literally: I want to build extraordinary things. I want to make a dent in the universe. We get one life — one shot — why not make the best of it?

Why I write

The best way to learn something is to teach it — that's not a slogan, it's my method. Everything here is something I learned, built, or got wrong first-hand. If I can't teach it, I don't understand it yet.

If you're building something, I'd love to hear from you.