Sam Venis —
Writing
Research
Applied Strategy
Hi, I’m Sam—a technical writer & strategist working with startups & executives on their narrative strategy, brand positioning, cultural manifestos and growth.
My thoughts on technology, art and culture have appeared in places like The Guardian, The New Republic, Spike Art Magazine, The Block, and many others. I also write cultural research reports & thought leadership for executives & startups – mostly on the ways that economics, technology and cultural systems intersect.
Currently, I live in Brooklyn where you can find me espousing hot takes on philosophy, autofiction, geopolitics, and the internet. I love shooting street photography and attending the theater, but, really, I’d rather be touching grass.
Background
My career has meandered over the years, but I’ve always been chasing the path of what interests me the most.
I started in strategic foresight at a design firm where my job was to help companies think intelligently about the future. Then I jumped into the startup world and built a marketing agency called Acquire that helped hundreds of startups, SMBs and large organizations scale.
Starting a company means doing a bit of everything, so while at Acquire I helped hire and manage our 30+ person team, build our workflows and sales strategy, lead the effort to support our clients, and plan the distribution of hundreds of millions in digital ad spend.
After a few years of freelance consulting, I decided that I wanted to go deeper intellectually, and sharpen my writing skills, so I moved to New York and got a degree in cultural reporting & criticism at NYU.
Currently, my client work attempts to bring all of these elements together—the rigor and style of New Journalism with the utility that animates the best products in the world.
Strategy & Ghostwriting
I’ve worked at nearly every level of the communications stack, but my best work focuses on putting language to the big picture.
At times, that means helping organizations position themselves within wider socio-cultural contexts with qualitative research. It also means brand strategy and content production; help with fundraising decks, public-facing reports, narrative manifestos, op-eds & tweetstorms; really anything with a strategic narrative.
I like the big picture, but I also like getting my hands dirty. Writing website copy, building case studies, preparing blog posts—these are all parts of the work I really enjoy.
These days, a lot of my projects involve ghostwriting, both for companies and organization leaders. Among others, I’ve worked with leadership at companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Lululemon, Autodesk, Volkswagen, Campari, and Travelzoo. I’ve also worked with many startups, both venture-funded and bootstrapped.
If you want to work together, you can learn more about my approach to consulting here. You can also book a call directly.
Journalism &
Other Writing
As well as writing Technical Personae, I write op-eds, reported features, explainers, and reviews on a freelance basis. Among other venues, this work has appeared in The Guardian, The New Republic, Spike Art Magazine, Airmail, The Mars Review of Books, Misc Magazine, Early Magazine, and many others.
Sometimes I describe myself as a tech journalist, but I see reporting as only a single (particularly useful) toolkit for observing and describing the world. All of us are taking part in a civilization-level transformation of social system, largely precipitated by the internet and what Benjamin Bratton calls “the stack.” My work obsesses over the strange, unexpected, and bizarre collisions between these changing systems and the people building them. Particularly as it relates to new models of governance, finance, ideology, media, and design.
I also write personal essays and memoir, and I’m currently at work on a play about the Quebecois separatist movement in 1976 Montreal. As a neurotic Jewish writer who grew up on Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, most of this work has to do with religion, sex, social pieties, and (inter)personal mythologies. For now, these two aspects of my work (tech analysis and personal writing) are distinct, but I’m searching for ways to make them collide.