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
Contributions:653 commits, 47 PRs, 184 pushes in 12 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Sam primarily contributed to the core logic and implementation of the mustache.java library. They focused on adding new features, such as inverted sections, and fixing existing bugs related to various aspects of the template parsing and execution. Their work included modifications to classes such as `MustacheCompiler` and `Mustache`, demonstrating a deep understanding of the library's internal workings and intended functionality. The user’s contributions also extended to improving the efficiency and robustness of the core template handling process.
former home of the groovy programming language, moved to https://github.com/apache/groovy
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:200 commits in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:Sam contributed to the core Groovy language, focusing on improving the core functionality of the language. Their work involved fixing bugs in the Groovy language's internal workings. They implemented new features like verbatim GStrings, and regular expression support, and improved the template system.
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Sam Pullara - Managing Director at Gene Network Sciences