Sam Hart

Meet Sam Hart (EMBA ’24), Owner & Founder of Hathr.AI, a HIPAA-compliant AI platform transforming how healthcare organizations manage sensitive patient data. A former Special Operations Pilot and DoD consultant, Sam launched Hathr.AI to bring the power of generative AI to regulated industries where privacy and security are paramount.

Which Darden courses and/or activities have had the biggest impact on your career post-MBA? 

The accounting, economics, and mergers and acquisitions courses were amazing because they gave me another lens to see how people viewed the world and actually spent their time and resources.  Incentives matter, and having the tools to start asking better questions about systems is incredibly important. Businesses are hard to understand if you can’t read and ask questions about a financial statement.

What advice would you have for prospective and current Darden students who are interested in pursuing a career in the tech sector? 

Be aggressively humble, curious, and have a plan for rapidly testing hypotheses.  No one knows the answer for you, and you must be ready to test a hunch you have rapidly and with as few resources as possible.  No one needs someone to describe a problem better or create another process – at Hathr.AI we need people who can provide clear value to our team quickly.

What characteristics are most important to succeed in tech?  

I wish I could tell you – that’s a question for Reed Hoffman or Bezos, ha!

What has been a challenge in your tech journey, and how do you manage this?

Hiring for the right blend of culture, technical capability, and scrappiness.  Finding the right people to work with is always the hardest – there’s a Special Operations quote that “Humans are more important than hardware”, and without the right team at the right time, you can always go down in flames.  Finding the right culture fit by hiring outcome-based not ego-based people, making for a culture of candor without malice, responsibility, and technical capability is crucial; I typically work with a teammate on low-stake projects before graduating them to anything of consequence.  If something is too small for a teammate to do excellently, then I can’t trust you with something big.