Summary
Sam Pullara is a Managing Director at Sutter Hill Ventures with 22 years of engineering and investing experience focused on enterprise infrastructure, cloud enablement, and security. He combines deep systems and software expertise—evidenced by open-source contributions to projects like the IntelliJ Scala plugin, Groovy core, and mustache.java—with a track record of founding, advising, and investing in infrastructure and data companies. Based in Los Altos, he scouts and partners with engineering teams tackling hard technical problems in large markets, especially databases, storage, compute, and SaaS. His background includes senior technical leadership at Yahoo and hands-on engineering at Twitter, giving him rare credibility as both operator and investor. Notably, his open-source work shows a practical emphasis on performance and compatibility, such as optimizing Java cloning and configurable import sorting for developer tooling. He prefers introductions via mutual acquaintances, reflecting a curated, relationship-driven approach to sourcing opportunities.
22 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
BS Physics, BS Physics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute
MS Physics, MS Physics at Northwestern University