WHO IS SAM?
Sam, like any Oliner, was an engineer before she’d even heard of entrepreneurship. Graduating in 2012 as a Mechanical Engineer, she’d only been introduced to the idea two years earlier through the Foundry, a club that she helped to completely reinvent. After college Sam worked at several companies including writing code for a startup. This was largely because she wanted to understand the process of making before she managed makers. Soon, however, she would be founding her own business.
Sam first began to consider founding a business when she and her friend Andrea Cuadra created a game called emoticubes at a hackathon sponsored by Hasbro. She saw how passionate her friend was about the game space and knew that she wanted to create a business with her.
After their experience at the hackathon, Sam and Andrea decided to create a company they called Crazy Machine and go to Nicaragua to work on their product and developing other games. In designing these games Sam says “They have to be easy enough for people to pick up the rules quickly, but difficult enough that it takes time and practice to master.” Sam claims this to be the common thread in all successful game products.
Emoticubes ended up being their first game under Crazy Machine. After building their first prototype out of cubes and pipe cleaners, they went through fifty-five iterations before settling on the final product design.They were contacted by a major company interested in acquiring their design. They were ultimately passed on but learned a lot from the experience. Sam has also designed an app called Mixup in which the objective is to unscramble letters to form words.